


The Tricky Business of Disclosing the Greed of a Martyr

by ActuallyAndroid



Category: The Legend of Zelda & Related Fandoms, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Genre: Confessions, Cooking, F/M, Jealousy, Lore friendly, Love Confessions, Lust, M/M, Masturbation, Oral Sex, Pining, Pressure, Reader-Insert, Rejection, Sex, Slow Burn, and saving the world is relegated to a lower priority, link can't take care of himself
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-31
Updated: 2018-02-08
Packaged: 2018-11-06 16:06:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 26,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11039598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ActuallyAndroid/pseuds/ActuallyAndroid
Summary: He wasn't much of a talker when you saw him first in Kakariko. Wasn't much of anything at all, if you were honest, bar a stoic mess trying his best to be a hero.





	1. In Which He Staves the Silence

Your first impression of the Legendary Hero was, at best, underwhelming.

On the first day, he walked into Kakariko like an ungroomed child, with an uncombed mop of hair and mismatched clothes. A rusty axe half his size hung from the belt around his waist, and there was no mention of the allusive sword or famous blue tunic that had described his immediate appearance in Impa’s stories. Honestly, you doubted you'd have recognised him in the first place had it not been for Paya, who embezzled you out of the better half of a day just to talk about him like a love-struck teenager.

Even despite his initial shortcomings in appearance, however, he was most distinctly lacking on the social front; little in his interactions with the townsfolk suggested a personality past an almost robotic need to fulfill his heroic duty, like he was listening to people not out of the effort of making friends or having fun, but for the commitment of making sure not one person in the village was dissatisfied.

Your first opinion of him concluded that he probably wasn't all that into the nuance of fashion or matching clothes despite being shamefully attractive, and that he had relentless dedication for fulfilling everyone’s petty requests. Then, the impression he left on you ran out, and you couldn’t pin down any further aspects of his personality.

Eventually, your turn to be assisted came too. Caked in mud from the tips of your fingers to your elbows and very clearly miffed at something, you sat on the side of the Kakariko inn with a rag and a bowl of clean water.

He walked out of Impa’s house and asked if there was anything he could help you with.

“You're the Legendary hero, aren't you? I've seen you around.” You tried your best to remain nonchalant, but it was difficult when your clothes were laced with mud so thick you couldn't tell what they were made from. Who was the fashion disaster now? You had to ask, and after a prompt once-over the hero’s overstretched clothes you decided that yes, it was still in fact him.

He nodded.

“You've been going around left and right helping the villagers out. Nice of you to stop by here too.”

Awaiting his response, you continued tending to your clothes, but the anticipation of his reply came and went. You looked up at him, because maybe he’d fallen asleep on the spot or something, but there was no such thing. He was just being blatantly silent.

“Hm. Not much of a talker, are you?” you asked, but it was more of an attempt to ease the silence than ask a genuine question.

Confusion filled out his features, like he wasn’t even sure what you meant.

What? Had it never crossed his mind you might have wanted a conversation with him?

“I guess now that you’re here, I might have a little job for you." After concluding that he'd already depleted his shallow pool of responses by talking to Impa, you couldn't help but feel like it would be in your best interest to avoid further small talk.

Instead, you described the disaster that occurred during your last hunt, where somewhere in-between your incorrectly fastened quiver and a very intense chase with an already wounded (but still very stubborn) boar, all six of your best hunting arrows fell into a pool of mud and were never seen again. You could fashion your own out of twigs and Bokoblin horns, sure, but it just so happened you were fresh out, and this guy conveniently wanted something to do.

You sent him on a quest to find fifty Bokoblin horns, and promised you’d pay him well when he returned.

 

* * *

 

When he came back, you scouted him from a tree far long before he saw you. Over the past few days, you’d gotten very proficient in catching prey by throwing rocks at rabbits from trees, but getting your arrows back was still relief enough to send you scrambling down the branches, knees and shoulders all scratched up until you slumped down at the roots of the tree and cradled your leg to ease the pain of bashing it against a branch.

Link didn’t seem to notice.

“I’ve brought the Bokoblin horns,” he said, with a completely straight face. You watched him tip out several of said item from a rucksack tied around his back, and it grew into a pile that was honestly, really, unprecedentedly large. You'd been keeping him busy, it seemed.

“Oh, wow. Thank you," you said, and leafed through the pile awkwardly, admiring the sheer mass of it. “I mean - if I'm gonna be honest, fifty of these things is actually way more than I thought it would be." To tell the truth, you were beginning to feel sort of stupid for bashing out a random number just because it sounded good at the time. "Like, now that they're all in front of me, I don't think I need that many. The only thing I hunt is wild game, so I tend to reuse my arrows when I can.”

You expected him to look a little exasperated, maybe even sort of annoyed with you, but his stock-still expression made you feel even worse somehow. It was out of the nervous darting of your gaze that you noticed the quiver slung around his back. “You use a bow, right?” you asked, eager to help. “How about I make twenty-five arrows for myself, and then I make the other twenty-five for you?”

His nod surprised you, but you were happy to see it all the same.

“Brill,” you said, and smiled. Over the hill, nestled in a little clearing that overlooked the village, your house (a small hut, really; barely good enough to keep the elements out on a rainy day) crouched over a hill that was just in sight from where the two of you were standing. You pointed at it.

"Give me half an hour and then meet me up there, yeah?"

Another quick nod from him, and then he was gone.

 

* * *

 

Almost true to your word, you came back after thirty-five minutes of stick collecting and arrow fastening with a nice pile of arrows neatly wrapped like a bushel of flowers. He was already waiting at your doorstep when you got there, so the hurried briskness with which you handed him the arrows was substitute for a verbal apology. (Not to suggest that he'd have minded either way.) With a blankness that was proving itself customary, he put them into a quiver fastened around his back, and turned to the path leading him back to the main part of Kakariko.

For a second, it looked like that might be it. That this would be where your claim to fame of 'assisting the famous Hero of Hyrule' would end, and you'd have to tuck your future children into bed at night and tell them the bedtime stories were over.

But it wasn't.

Because some form of madness struck you in that moment: some leftovers of the same eagerness to help that had you running around the forest trying to find sticks for Link's arrows, that said, in these words exactly: 'maybe you should, you know, do more to help considering he's Hyrule's last get-out-of-jail-free card from Ganon's wrath.'

“Hold on," you exclaimed to him, convinced by it. He looked back at you, suspended in a half-turn, and you were caught off guard, like you hadn't actually anticipated he would stop. "I was -- thinking that maybe as thanks for helping me out, I could offer this as some sort of service to you. I mean, you’re out there battling things ten times more dangerous than I am, so you’re probably running out of arrows all the time, right?”

Your question quickly became rhetorical when he didn’t respond. Not (yet) used to carrying a conversation by yourself, it took the passage of a few, drawn-out seconds to realise it was cue for you to speak again. “So uh, if you’re ever in need of any arrows or something, I could always make them for you. You’d just have to bring me the Bokoblin horns.”

He considered it, maybe did some quick maths in his head, before he turned back to you and nodded again, equally as systematic in his delivery as he was with everything else. After debating it internally, you jogged up to him, payed him one hundred rupees as further thanks, and watched him go.

 

* * *

 

The next time he came, you had not even heard his footsteps. Decked out in Sheikah gear from head to toe, he approached from behind where you were standing on the porch to your home and scattered a pile of Bokoblin horns by your side. Initially you hadn't even realised he was there, because he'd managed to catch you while you were distracted with the particularly mouth-watering sizzle of a hand-caught and cooked prime boar, as you turned it over on the stick it was roasting on.

“Could you turn these into arrows?” he said, after a while. You jumped a little.

“Where did you come from?”

Abruptly kick-started into standing, you brushed dust and grease off your clothes in a half-hearted attempt to give your hands something to do. Seeing him again was quite a shock to the system; he looked much better in the Sheikah clothes than he did with his threadbare white shirt and pants. The darker colours enunciated the curves of his muscles and made him look leaner, and the material was tight fitting enough to reveal the dips in his abs at the base of his stomach. (Even his bob looked sort of cute.) He pointed out towards the summit surrounding the valley, and you looked at him incredulously for a second.

“From the mountains?” you asked again, and he gave a firm nod. “How did you get up there in the first place?”

“I climbed.”

“You did what?”

“And I used my paraglider on the way down.” He gestured to a bit of cloth strapped to his back.

“You’re not hurt or anything, are you?”

He shook his head impassively. It seemed like the idea of scaling a mountain just to paraglide from it with a cheap bed sheet wasn't as far-fetched to him as it was to you. You looked up at the mountain, then down at him, and then down to the weathered path that drew a line from your house to the rest of Kakariko village.

“What’s wrong with walking? It's a lot safer,” you justified, half-heartedly gesturing to the path.

“Gliding is faster,” he replied, like it was all the explanation you needed. Never before had you thought you'd have to re-evaluate whether scaling a steep, mountainous overhang with presumably no equipment could be dangerous, and yet here you were - feeling like an overbearing parent who wouldn't let their child play outside.

“Alright. I mean, sort of dangerous, but alright." You supposed that had to do for now. Still a little dumbfounded, and maybe a little worried for his health, you took another look at the Bokoblin horns and remembered why he’d came here in the first place.

“I’m heading out to get some branches. You can sit down while you’re waiting,” you said, waving your hand towards the stump you'd just got up from.

He made no move to stray from his spot.

“Probably should sit down, actually." You took hold of his wrist and gently pulled him towards the stump. “If you feel like fainting or something, then just lie down. I’ll be back in five minutes.” Still half-heartedly attempting to parse the information, you let go of his wrist and turned the roast over to stop it from burning while you started wandering around town to look for sticks. You looked back once on your way there, and he was focused on his hand, gently brushing his thumb across where you’d held his wrist.

 

* * *

 

Link got restless quickly while you were gone. He’d been neglecting eating in favour of getting more done lately, but it was only now with the dense smell of cooked meat about the air that his stomach had something to say about it. He lasted about ten minutes fighting off the urge to take a bite, but at the eleventh, the inescapable pull of the meat’s musk won him over.

Cautiously, he leant forward just enough to get a better idea of what meat it was, how long it'd been cooking for, and maybe what spices you used and whatnot before he was promptly interrupted.

“Are you hungry?” you asked, ten different shades of humour to your voice and a pile of sticks in your arms.

Link drew back immediately, and embarrassment flushed his skin to a gentle pink. The urgency with which he shook his head might have been alarming, had it not been so funny.

“Are you sure?” you asked again, as you put down the pile of sticks, content to embarrass him further. The final blow to his ego did not come from your lighthearted teasing however, but from the coincidentally brilliant timing of his rumbling stomach. He felt it coming and tried to silence it by clutching at his abdomen, but to no avail, because the sound still tumbled out of him loud enough to scare away a nearby bird. 

You knew you wouldn’t really be able to stop yourself from laughing, so you didn't even try. Instead, you opted to make it up to him by cutting off a section of the meat with a knife you left under the roast, and handing it to him stabbed onto the end of the blade.

“Here,” you said, with your voice a little raw from laughter, and waved it in front of him. A little wary, he looked you up and down like he was wondering whether you were being serious or not. “Come on, just take it,” you continued, and it didn't take more than that to convince him of your good intentions. He took the knife from you slowly, like he wanted to give you the chance to change your mind before the point of no return.

“Thank you,” he said, when he finally accepted it.

Embarrassment still clear on his face, he pulled his mask down and took a shy bite out or the meat, and then another, and another, and God, was he starving or something? You'd never seen someone eat something so fast. There wasn't even enough time to cut yourself a piece before he handed the knife back to you, desolate of traces of anything edible.

You stared at him dumbly for a second.

“Wow, that must have been better than I thought." You did your best to figure out where all the food had gone. “I mean, really, that was fast.” There was certainly no evidence of it around his waistline (as slim and toned as it had been before he scarfed it down) so it looked like he’d just absorbed it into himself. “You can take some more if you want,” you said, still sort of looking him over. He looked at you again - making sure he was allowed - before taking off another small chunk of meat and proceeding to devour it in much the same manner as the last.

“Do you like it?” you asked, as though it wasn’t obvious. He nodded at you with his cheeks puffed up full of food.

Cute.

You smiled to yourself when he looked away, and knelt down to continue with arrow preparation. With every bite he took, his reservations receded further into the back of his head. A couple of servings later his enthusiasm took over, and he forgoed chewing completely; the food was gone almost as soon as you saw him pick it up.

You continued preparing the arrows a bit more incredulously.

“When was the last time you ate?” you asked, because you weren't sure how to better phrase the question of whether he spent the majority of his life malnourished. The emphatic gulp as he swallowed a large chunk of meat to answer your question caught you off guard.

“Yesterday,” he said, putting a chunk of meat down onto his lap for a second. “I roasted some apples during the afternoon.”

That in itself raised red flags, considering it was getting to evening now. But something still didn't sit quite right with you.

“How many apples?” you asked.

He held up two fingers. Then he noticed the look you gave him, and proceeded to hold those same two fingers up a bit more sheepishly.

“You've gotta be joking.”

He brought his hand down. You gave him the most stupefied look you were capable of, but he didn’t do much to respond to it apart from looking really self-conscious. “You know what?” you started, and with an indisputable stubbornness lifted the roast off the cooker and pushed it into his hands. “Just have the rest of this. I think you need it more than I do.”

Had your tone left any room for discussion, he might have tried to give it back to you. For a little while, he felt too bashful to dig in, so he took to staring at you until the two of you settled into a tense silence, and you went back to making arrows. Even without looking at the grimace settling on your face, he could tell your attempts at tying Bokoblin horns to the sticks were a little sloppy and frustrated - like there was still a part of you that was angry at how pitiful he was. (Enough to make you feel obliged to give him your entire meal, and that was no small feat). It was three arrows in that one of the sticks snapped, and whatever threads of tension had sewn your lips shut went with it.

“I just don't get that,” you said. “What’s so important that you can’t spare a few minutes during the day to cook a few mushrooms or something?”

With an exaggerated motion, you threw the broken stick into the charcoal pit that had been cooking the roast. You weren’t really expecting him to reply, so you were surprised to hear his voice.

“A lot of people are relying on me.”

When you looked back at him, he was looking down, where the roast you'd given him waited on his lap. His thumb stroked against the stick it'd been skewered on, but otherwise, he did nothing consequential in terms of eating it, like he couldn't bring himself to do it. You took the chance to observe him for a few moments longer, trying to figure him out, but the distance in his face was set in stone, as vague and unclear as it was when he had the Sheikah mask pulled up to his cheeks. You indulged in a sigh you did your best to keep under your breath.

‘Did you have to do this?' You asked yourself.

'Did you  _want_ to do this?'

'Was it really on your bucket list to baby someone who was ‘too busy’ to eat food?’

They were phrased as questions, but the morally aligned side of you knew the answers were: yes, yes, and yes before the other one even had the chance to make an argument.

Here we go, you thought, biting the bullet.

“In that case, you should come back here if you're ever hungry.”

Your tone sounded underplayed even to you, considering you were basically offering him an open-ended contract with yourself as a dedicated cook and no strings attached. What was the proper name for someone like that again? A housewife? A mother?

He gave you that weird look again, and you still couldn't tell what he was thinking. “Really, I mean it,” you said, because being stared at so blatantly was uncomfortable at best. “I've always got way too much food to eat by myself anyway.” Distracting yourself, you threaded cucoo feathers through an arrow as a makeshift fletching, and absentmindedly wondered what he found so intriguing in your niceness that forced him to such lengthy inspection. Eventually he nodded, taking another piece out of the roast in his lap.

“I will,” he said.

It took a little while, and the sun had gathered around the horizon by the time you were finished, but in due course a pile of arrows lay nicely fastened at your feet. When you handed them to him, he put them into his quiver and walked down the hill from your house. He continued into the sunset, until you saw him disappear around the corner of a mountain.

Suddenly, you became aware of the silence.


	2. Preventative Measures

Four nights and three days of waiting brought him back, carrying a net of two skinned ostriches. There was a woozy tread in his steps, and he rocked to and fro as you appraised the meat with an impressed glean to your eye.

“I've got just the spices for this,” you said, and enthusiastically started running about to organise said spices, telling him to sit down on top of your cheap bed while you fumbled through your pots and jars of garlic and black pepper. He was always staring at you when you saw him out of the corner of your eye, but eventually, the process of cooking hypnotised you into a state of focus that hazed him away into the background.

“It’s nearly done,” you mused about excitedly, not a whole fifteen minutes later. The wide smile on your face might have been infectious had anyone been there to see it. “Sorry it took so long, you’re probably starving.” Smile still plastered on your cheeks, you twisted a little to look at his reaction, but found yourself surprised instead. Sprawled out on your bed, he lay with his legs spread and one arm resting on top of his stomach. The only motion came from the slow deflation of his chest, and the stillness settled your excited nerves into a smooth ebb of gentle surprise.

He’d fallen asleep facing you.

Some halfway instinct between motherly and curious took your attention off the food. You walked up to him and inspected him closely, making sure he was well and truly asleep. A little prod at his cheeks caused no sign of stirring, but now that you were so close you could see his face more closely: the swollen and pale spread of grey under his eyes protruded from underneath them, and the veil of white flushing his skin hollowed out his cheeks until his skin was corpse-like.

Feeling a little bad that you hadn’t noticed his tiredness immediately, you grabbed a thick blanket and lay it over his body, stopping yourself short of tucking him in. For a second, you considered chewing him out for falling asleep on your bed (just before dinner, no less) but you couldn’t stomach the thought of lecturing him over something so insignificant. Instead, you just returned to your seat at the makeshift oven and prodded the ostrich steak a couple of times with a stick.

 

* * *

 

His awakening begun with a yawn. Stretching his body out like an unveiling flower and feeling the duvet he was under fall off his chest, Link felt the sun on his face most clearly. He noticed you only a little while later, more bored than he’d ever seen you before.

Graces coming back full force, he stood up abruptly from the bed and stumbled to undo the creasing from where he’d lay on it. You hadn’t looked very impressed with his efforts, so his stance immediately became apologetic, but you just shrugged - prodding again at whatever was left of the tinder you’d used to make the fire. Link ceased his fumbling and took to looking somewhere else.The whole room smelt of charcoal.

“You really don’t take care of yourself at all,” you said, out of the blue. There was no anger in your voice, just a sombre undertone that relaxed his shoulders and dripped something on the milder side of guilt into his stomach.

“Sorry,” he said. “I won’t sleep in your bed again.”

You shook your head. "That’s not the point.” He noticed that you’d taken chunks out of the ostrich meat to eat. “I’m just concerned you don’t know anything about keeping yourself alive in the wilderness past what you can do with a sword.”

He shifted uncomfortably, and the sword he’d put near the wall of your front door suddenly looked awfully patronising.

“You realise that you can’t help anybody if you’re dead, right?” You put a chunk of ostrich meat on the unused plate sat next to you.

“Yes, I know,” Link said.

“Then how come you're so bad at taking care of yourself?” Admittedly, he looked much better after a nap, but the deathly paleness in his features still stuck with you in a way that his embarrassed blush would not so easily wipe away. He opened his mouth to say something, but you interrupted him. “I understand you have to save Princess Zelda. But do you really think you’ll be in any condition to fight whatever is waiting for you inside that castle when you’re running on nothing but a couple of baked apples?”

Promptly, his mouth closed, and that pitiful look came back, like he was bracing himself for another couple of lectures. When you said nothing, it dissolved into the gentle curve of a downcast expression.

“I’ve never lived out in the wilderness by myself before,” he said. It might have sounded like an excuse, had it not been for the sorry tone in his voice. “So I’m not good at knowing when to take breaks. And because I’m usually fighting monsters, the adrenaline keeps me awake, and I never get tired.”

“You never _feel_ tired,” you corrected. “But you definitely _get_ tired. And if you keep going like you are now, your body will give up on you and collapse before you can even set foot in the castle.” You handed him the plate and he took it from you, demurely bringing it into his chest.

“Even so, it’s not safe to sleep out in the wilderness alone,” he rebutted.

“Do you not have anywhere indoors to sleep?”

He shook his head. "I travel a lot, so I don’t tend to have time to regularly make it to an inn.”

Briefly, you wondered what made him think sleep was a luxury he could afford to relegate to lower priorities. Stacks of questions and arguments sat on your tongue, all itching for an angry tone.

“You really can’t spare an hour and a half to walk one way?”

Link fiddled with his fork awkwardly, circling it about his untouched food. You remembered suddenly that he hadn’t eaten yet, and decided to stave any further questions until he was finished with plate.

“It’s usually longer than that,” he said, eyes cast downwards with a grimace. “Sometimes I have to stray hours from the path, and I wouldn’t be able to afford more expensive equipment and clothing if I had to spend twenty rupees every day on a bed.”

You stilled your irritation by taking a deep breath in, and holding it for long enough that it hitched in your throat when it came back out again. Honestly, you’d never seen someone with such a lamentable idea of what took priority. Like he’d been born on the wrong end of a hierarchy of needs, filling out the base with prestige and all the little extras with rest and food.

“Just eat the ostrich for now,” you sighed. It could all be explained when he was finished.

His attention was drawn back to his plate of food, but he still waited in a couple more seconds before deeming it safe to take the first bite. After the fork made it past his lips, a happy pink veined his cheeks, and he’d looked so immediately better that you decided to not say anything else until he was done at least.

When his plate was clear, he put it down at your feet.

“Finished already?” you asked, and he nodded.

In all honesty, it felt sort of good to have him polish off your cooked meal like it was the best thing he’d ever eaten. You doubted it was _that_ good, really, and you suspected his hunger did most of the work, but it was on rare occasions that you anyone even visited your home, let alone stayed for long enough to eat your cooking.

Paya used to frequent, but now that she was an adult, she’d in taken more to caring for Impa, and it was difficult to make enough time for the trek up the hill to your house. Then, sometimes you weren’t even in because you were hunting, and now that you thought about it, you hadn’t talked to her since last month. (Excluding the times she left money on your table after buying the raw game you left on your porch for the villagers.)

As much as this whole situation felt like a lecture, it was still probably the first formidable conversation you'd had for about two weeks. It felt a little bitter to accept that, like you were some sort of village hermit only just coming to terms with their predicament.

“So you’re out there by yourself?” you asked, but already knew the answer.

Out of the corner of your eye, you saw Link nod. Putting another serving of ostrich onto the plate was messy; your mind was elsewhere, so the oil dripped from the meat down your fingers to the base of your palm.

“And you’ve got no-one that could scout for enemies as you sleep?”

You stared down at the plate, not totally ignoring him but making no effort to divert attention his way either.

Maybe it would be nice, you thought, putting the plate down into your lap. You’d always sort of wanted to get out of here anyway.

“No-one to look out for you?”

He mirrored your troubled expression. It took the slow passage of a few seconds until he realised there was something he couldn’t see in the way your shoulders slumped and bottom lip hid nervously behind the top. Making a move to reach for you, he leant forward from his seat and unclasped his fingers, like he wanted to place them on your shoulder.

A thick carpet of foliage settled under your bare feet. The dusk was pretty, but you’d scarcely seen it bare when the endless row upon row of thick trees was such a constant. It was only now, with your back aching on the forest floor and your leg twisted at an awkward angle that you saw the expanse of navy overhead - stretching out for an infinity that seemed even bigger than that of the forest. The bird’s nest lay untouched on a branch some lightyears above, a black silhouette against the sky.

It was getting so cold you could barely feel the pain past a dull thud anymore. The hot tears on your cheeks were too, just a memory, traced with remnants of a numb itch. This was an alright way to go, you couldn’t help but think, although you’d have preferred it without the messy screaming at the beginning. Would have been nice if it happened later, too. Or with someone else to hold your hand.

Somewhere in the back of your head you felt voices, but you were so far gone that all you could make out from their mumbling was a soft hum, like the flutter of a bee far away. But they got louder. “You’ve grown, so much,” they said, like you’d heard adults talk to other children, “you’re all grown up now.” And louder again, with clear vowels and consonants. “I’ve been watching you, you know. From up there.” The dark sky threatened to swallow you, and you felt your head swim. “I don’t know any adults that can shoot an arrow at a rabbit from nine and a half trees away.”

“How about other kids?”

“Definitely not other kids,” they said, and instead of smiling about it you just nodded numbly.

“It’s because I’ve been in the forest for so long,” you explained. Your short, pudgy fingers felt for the limb of a bow, but were only met with the coldness of the earth.

“You’ve been out there all alone,” they said, then repeated, over and over in unison, and with each cycle you felt your head get further from your body, stretching not like a bowstring, but with something of no elasticity, just getting longer and longer.

“All alone,” they said.

But that wasn’t right.

The sounds didn’t match, and the discord cleared the fog in your head and threw your drifting body back to the earth, because - oh - those were real voices.

“Impa, could you tell me the story of how you rescued that hero again?”

A soft rustle through the trees, at a pace so distantly familiar that you could only attribute it to the sound of two feet. Not an animal, or boar, or bird, but a person.

“In a little while. We’ve walked out quite far into the forest today.”

The adrenaline rush was immediate, and your eyes filled with tears as soon as the pain came back full force. Your cry for help came out as a disturbed rasp, and after it, all of the sound stopped.

“What was that?” You heard the voice of the little girl again, half inquisitive and half frightened. You tried again, and it was a little better, but not by much. You were hungry, thirsty, and your voice had almost all given out, so instead, you started hyperventilating, because now that you weren’t alone death suddenly seemed scary again.

The footsteps continued, getting closer and closer (to your great relief), and then the bright light of a lantern illuminated the cluster of trees that circled your body.

“Oh my,” you’d heard.

Link saw you flinch when his hand met your shoulder.

The bright light of mid-day poured in through the window in your hut, and you felt the weight of a plate of ostrich on your lap. Link looked concerned.

“Are you alright?” he asked.

“Yeah,” you said, a bit quietly. “Just thinking.”

He drew back cautiously and squat down on the floor beside you. Your imagination was less compelling at that point, but it stilled filled your head with images of cracked bones peeking through the darkness of a Sheikah suit at the base of a mountain.

You looked about you for any of your more significant belongings, but at this point nothing of any value would be able to convince you to stay. There was a resolute determination in the way you met his eyes, and it was the first time you really noticed the pretty sky-blue filling out his irises.

“I think I should go with you,” you said.

He seemed surprised.


	3. but the loneliness that the silence entertained.

“When did he say he’d be here again?” Paya asked, impatiently twiddling her foot on the stairs leading up to Impa’s house. On your lap was a bag stuffed full of necessities and freshly washed travel clothes - of which at least half were the gracious courtesy of Paya’s wardrobe.

“Not sure. He just said he’d come by in the morning.”

You looked where the shadow cast by Impa’s house cut off into a bright flare of sunlight, reaching out to a field of grass that met up with it in a splash of vibrant green. The greenery followed the path on both sides and flared out to where the road disappeared behind a cliff, to a spot that focused your vacant stare in preparation for any sign of movement that would indicate Link’s arrival.

It was quiet now; a couple of minutes ago there was still the song of the wrens about the village, but it’d since eased off into silence. Now the early morning stillness was only broken up by the rustle of the wind pushing through branches, and the sound of shifting as Paya turned towards you.

“I’m going to miss you,” she said.

You showed up on her doorstep yesterday early evening, bags full of unpackable bric a brac hanging from your arms and news of your departure swirling on your tongue. When you handed her the bags under the pretext you couldn’t take them with you, she thought it an elaborate joke at first - until the apologetic grimace on your face convinced her otherwise.

“Oh my, you’re being serious!” she exclaimed, and dropped the rag she was holding in favour of hiding her mouth behind her hand. “Is this - Is it because I’ve been neglectful of our friendship? You haven’t been lonely up in that hill, have you?”

It was a misunderstanding that you were quick to correct, but the sincerity in the way she admonished herself stuck with you. “I can’t believe that I knew what you were like with being stuck in silence for too long,” she said, “and yet I still left you to fend for yourself up there.” And just what did she mean by that? You were fine with silence. Just fine. There was nothing wrong with talking to yourself during cooking once in a while (or all the time). Nothing wrong with getting goosebumps on your arms during nights that were quiet for too long, because it felt like you were back _there_ , back to lying on the forest floor, literally feeling the strength seep out from the tips of your fingers  - like it was something physical that could be lost.

“Don’t worry. I was fine,” you said, because you really thought you were. “The silence was nothing to be afraid of.” (But only because it was easy to break.)

You found there was no way you could refuse her earnestness when she asked you to sleepover at Impa’s house for your last night in Kakariko (“like we used to do, when we were kids”) so the entire night was dedicated to sombre and heartfelt apologies that eventually trickled down to petty gossip. It was only at one in the morning when the two of you fell asleep, topsy-turvy in her bed.

“I’ll miss you too.” You said, sincerely.

Paya looked at you with a faraway focus; a soft jitter in her jaw tightened her lips. She gripped her bead necklace in her hands self-consciously.

“Will you be safe?” She asked; there was genuine concern in her voice. “I’ve heard some nasty stories on things that happen out of the walls of Kakariko. I’m not just referring to the threat of Guardians, either. Impa’s told me tales of attempted assassinations on the royal family by masked figures who call themselves the Yiga, and there’s goblins making encampments on every other field. I’m aware you’ve got your bow and arrow, but…”

She trailed off, hands still nervously fiddling about with her necklace.

“To be honest, I can’t promise it’ll be safe out there,” you said. It was blunt, but it’d do you good to rip the bandaid off now. After all, you’d spent the majority of your childhood out in the wilderness; you knew better than anyone else that it was unpredictable. “But that’s exactly why I have to go. Link’s got enough problems trying to fight off monsters and immediate dangers, I don’t think basic needs like sleep even come to mind anymore. I told you last night didn’t I? I took my eyes off him for barely five minutes and he fell asleep waiting for food to cook.”

Paya slumped a little in her seat, and her voice came out soft.

“He’s such a hard worker,” she said, resting her wistful gaze on the spot you were observing just moments before.

“He’s also an idiot who doesn’t know better,” you replied. “I swear he’s gonna get himself killed if he doesn’t have someone to filter out all his stupid ideas. Did you know he got to my house one time by parachuting off the edge of a mountain? Unbelievable.”

Paya surprised you out of your exasperation with a cute laugh that she covered with her hand.

“You make it sound like you’re his mother,” she chuckled, and it stopped you in your tracks a little. Sure, maybe you were taking this whole thing a _little_ personally, but saving Hyrule _was_ personal.

“Alright. You let me know what it feels like when he collapses on your lawn and then we can talk,” you said, with half a mind to burst into another rant about it.

“Oh, I can’t imagine I’d mind that at all,” Paya said.

You snapped to look at her in shock, but the subtle smile on her face gave her away, and you shook your head knowingly. She laughed into her hand.

“You’re impossible,” you said, and laughed along with her.

When the giggles died off, she settled her look straight on you, and her eyes were oddly analytical for a face as soft as hers.

“Honestly though, I think you’ll be good for him.”

You wanted to ask her what she meant, but her attention was off you before you could even formulate a question. She lifted her hand in the direction of the hills, and the lights in her eyes lit up. “Oh, there he comes!” she exclaimed, standing up to brush herself off. Her hands started fiddling together.

You turned to where she had looked, and it took you a second to even recognise the dressed up character as someone you’d ever even met before.

Link had a horse, it turned out. A pretty white stallion dressed in purple and gold accents, sporting a graceful mane threaded with red and yellow flowers like something from a fairy tale. He himself, wore the clothes of a knight, padded in iron pauldron and the red, blazoned mark of the Hylian emblem on his chest. After he looked around briefly, meeting his eyes was a lot more daunting than you remembered it being; everything about him was a far cry from the bumpkin with misfit clothes that you'd initially described him to be. He got off his horse walk to Impa’s house, and it patiently waited for him at the entrance to Kakariko where he left it (not even tacked to the fence) and two heavy rucksacks hanging from its embroidered saddle.

You picked up your packed bags and started walking down the stairs. Paya trailed behind you with all the grace of a shy child.

“Speak of the devil,” you said, when he came within earshot.

“W - welcome, Master Link,” Paya said, after you.

Link acknowledged Paya’s greeting by nodding briefly in her direction. When he turned to you and saw the packed bag hoisted over your shoulder, the rigidness in his posture softened a little.

“You haven’t changed your mind?” He asked, like he expected otherwise.

“Of course not,” you replied. Shifting your weight about your feet, you waited in case he had anything else to add. “Everything that I deemed a necessity is packed. Everything else has been handed out.”

You took the bag from your back, and held it out in front of him.

“These are all of my belongings.” You said, and it felt meager compared to the entirety of your home, an empty building now devoid of anything of value or sentiment. “So there’s no going back.” You smiled, despite the finality of the statement. Understanding flashed across Link’s face, and worry over Paya’s.

“Very well,” he said.

He took the bag off you carefully, and you noted that among his detached behaviour, there was a vague semblance of respect in the way he handled your belongings. It was clear he was well aware of what it felt like to have your entire livelihood packed into a single bag.

“I’ll come by to visit sometime,” you told Paya, who looked like she wanted to speak up.

“Please do,” she said, and leant forward shyly to embrace you. As you withdrew, she held onto your hand, and it was clear there was a nervousness to her jitters going beyond what she’d normally feel in Link’s presence. She took a breath so deep her chest puffed out with the effort to steel herself, and turned to Link with a determination you’d never seen her use.

“M - Master Link, if I may.” She begun, and brought the hand not in yours up to her necklace again. The both of you turned to her, and she almost wilted under the collective power of your gazes. “I am sure my friend will be of great use to you on your journey,” she said, and you felt her palms getting hot and sweaty. “Their skill with a bow is considered a local treasure,  and I - um, I believe their advice will also prove beneficial, especially with providing structure and a voice of reason to the life of someone as busy as yourself.”

She gripped your hand harder, although the tremors enfeebling her fingers prevented it from actually being forceful. “But - they are very dear to me, and the outside world is dangerous.” She withdrew her hand and clasped it together with the other. “So I must ask you take good care of them. Please ensure they’re safe, happy, and that no harm comes their way. Protect them with whatever means are necessary. I will not be able to forgive myself for letting them go otherwise.”

You grinned at her wholeheartedly before embracing her, and the force with which you lurched at her surprised her so much she jumped up with a squeal.

When you broke apart from her, it felt bittersweet.

“I will do whatever I can,” Link said, with a seriousness that was trademark of the hero himself. He adjusted the bag full of your belongings, and waited until it looked like you were done before he began to walk in the opposite direction, back to his horse.

“Thank you for everything,” you said to Paya, before she waved you off with glassy eyes, and you started trailing after Link. It was clear to you this would be the last time the wooden shacks of Kakariko would feel this familiar, and you said a mental farewell in turn to each house you passed: from the inn, to the stores, to each residential home. A whistle startled you out of your thoughts, and you barely got as far as figuring out it came from Link before his horse ran towards the two of you in a brisk canter.

“Oh wow, it even comes on command,” you said, when it eased off to stand in front of you. It lifted its head upwards as Link walked over to its side, and you ran your fingers through its thick mane, tracing your outstretched palm down to it's pale, pink nuzzle. “Where did you get it? It's beautiful.”

Link looked to the side sheepishly, as though the compliment was aimed at him.

“I caught it,” he said, putting your packed bag onto the horse’s back. It reared a little under the weight, and for a second you felt bad for bringing so much stuff along.

“From the wild?”

He nodded, readjusting the weight of the bags attached to its on the saddle.

“I’ll catch you one too, when we get to a herd,” he added, and pulled on the bridle of the horse towards the gate separating Kakariko from the outside world.

Giving the village a last, cursory glance, you waved back to Paya, who was watching you from the terrace of Impa’s house. A bright smile was on her face, although her eyes were a little sad from when you’d exchanged your farewells. Flat faces of mountain to your left and right dipped into the valley you walked through, and finally, Impa’s house disappeared behind them.

“So we've got food,” you mumbled (doing your best to distract yourself from her heartfelt goodbye, because the last thing you wanted to do was get homesick first thing after stepping out of Kakariko.) “Blankets, bows, arrows, matches, spare clothes, a water flask, a leather tarpaulin. We can pick up firewood at any time, and making a hut is just pulling enough tree branches together and putting the tarp on top. Should be waterproof, too.”

Another wooden gate passed you by. Hung from each pole was a string decorated in a familiar banners of blue that hung downwards like branches from a willow - the last gate before leaving Kakariko officially. It was daunting, but if you weren’t ready now, you never would be. “I think it sounds like we’re all set,” you said, to convince yourself, before walking through it.

The two of you walked up a gentle sweep of incline up a grassy hill, and the mountains to your side gave way to a swathe of blue that curved around the entire sky. It felt big, too big almost; you hadn’t strayed far out from Kakariko ever since Impa had taken you in, so you’d grown unaccustomed to this sort of emptiness. When the hill steepled off, Hyrule castle came into view as a swirl of black far, far away, surrounded on all sides by hills of green. Around it were spots of trees, ponds and lakes, boulders and mountains, and suddenly the big felt even bigger - reaching out to places even your imagination could not follow.

“Can’t believe I’m actually doing this,” you said nervously, but grinned in his direction. There wasn’t much to his expression but a shade of confusion, and even that disappeared before you had the chance to analyse it.

“Do you regret it?” He asked.

“Of course not.”

Link began leading the horse down the hill slowly overlooking Hyrule castle, supporting the bags on its saddle with one hand. “Someone needs to watch your back as you're getting a good night's rest, and that’s never going to change. I’m risking literally having the world end otherwise.” Standing on the other side of the horse, you ran your fingers over the ties binding the bags to the saddle, making sure they were fastened correctly.

It did not go over your head that Link was still barely not a stranger to you, yet here you were, attempting to take care of him like you’d known him for years. Link needed the help, you knew that, but considering the future of Hyrule depended on his wellbeing, it was still a lot of responsibility on your shoulders.

“Besides, I think it’s going to turn out to be an adventure. Just the two of us, out hiking and climbing mountains and trees and whatever else you do.” The smile you gave him was a little lopsided, because the staving nervousness and doubt mulling about inside you had half a mind to ditch this whole thing and go home.

“There’s a lot of fighting,” he said, like he was still trying to put you off.

There was no way you would let any uncertainty sway you. Someone had to do this, you told yourself. Someone had to be there to give him a sense of schedule and normality. To tell him when was a good time to eat, to work, and to rest.

“That's fine. I’m good with a bow,” you replied, jostling the weapon at your back to prove your point. “Been the best hunter in the village for as long as I can remember.”

There wasn’t an immediate reply, and you realised again that he was a little slow in terms of carrying a conversation. That was fine for now; you were sure he'd get into the habit of small talk with practise.

“I don't know how well that’ll hold up against a Hylian, mind,” you continued, giving the silver bow around his back a once-over. “I’ve heard you guys are like combat machines. Probably why you’re chosen as guards for the Royal family.”

A soft wind blew in your direction, and with it came the excitement of a new adventure all over again. Impa’s tales on the hero’s prowess started coming back in bits and pieces and (although you couldn’t really correlate them to the boy next to you and keep a straight face) they filled your head with curious questions and childlike wonder.

“Is it true you can see things in slow motion when your adrenaline kicks in?” you asked, letting the curiosity take rein.

Link gave it some thought, and the subtle way his thumb rubbed against his chin made you feel better about how much attention he was paying to your rambling; it seemed he was listening to you, even if there wasn’t always a verbal response to show for it.

“Sometimes when I jump in the air while I’m aiming with a bow, it feels like I’ve got more time to land the shot.”

“Ah, that’ll be it then,” you said, feeling a kind of childish satisfaction from knowing the stories Impa told you as a child were at least partially true. “How about super strength? Or was that an exaggeration?”

He was starting to get a little bashful, although it wasn’t immediately clear to you.

“Somewhat.”

“Bet you're just being humble,” you insisted, and did your best to take in the massive scale of the field in front of you. “I’ve heard Impa talk about you felling trees in minutes with only a rusty sword.” You stretched out to feel the sun be closer to your skin, and it felt fresh. “I couldn’t guess where you carry all that muscle to save my life. You’ve got to be as dense as lead at this point to not look like a beefed-up bodybuilder.”

He said nothing still. You found your muscles relax with the warmth of the sun, inclusive of your tongue.

“Speaking of muscles, that Sheikah suit looked really good on you. You should wear it more often.”

You looked towards him with the intention of sending a cheeky wink his way, but found his line of sight was no-where near your direction. Instead, there was an adorable blush that coursed his face like a sweep of peach wildfire, and a tight tension in his knuckles around the horse reins. You laughed inwardly a little.

Eventually, the steady thump of horse hooves against the earth numbed you into a stable rhythm. You stopped feeling the sun on your arms in favour of blanking to someplace else and making the trek easier. A couple of hours came and went with only passing comments (most of them your courtesy, of course) and it was only until you saw Link take out the device around his belt that anything of note happened.

You had never really stopped to think about what it was, despite seeing it around his waist before. Its surface was like reflections of the outside world in a still lake, perfectly flat images of things that looked like they should have had depth, but didn’t. The device was a mess of shifting symbols, sounds, and moving colours, and it made no sense for something that looked like it was made out of stone.

Before you could mention it however, Link put it back into his pocket and ushered his horse to start veering off in a slightly different direction.

“Where are we going?” you asked instead, following him down the incline.

“Getting another horse.”

He lead you down to the base of the hill and told you to wait behind a rock (next to his horse) as soon as he caught of a glimpse of the herd marked on his map. Absentmindedly, you pet the horse’s muzzle, half and eye trained on Link as he snuck up to hide from the herd behind a tree.

You didn’t think the way he grasped at the collar of his clothes was suspicious at first, but had you known he would slowly start pulling them over his back, and the cloth picturing the Hylian banner would fall to the floor along with his chainmail and pants, until he was left in nothing but dark, tight shorts, you might have thought otherwise.

He’d just stripped. Out in the field. In the middle of nowhere. In front of _you_.

Your hand stilled in embarrassment, and the horse whinnied to let you know you’d stopped petting it’s muzzle. You realised he was probably getting changed into something else, but couldn’t he have done it somewhere out of sight? Did he just assume you wouldn’t be watching? The whole thing felt about as surreal as you’d expect it to, and it wasn’t made any better by how he never once acknowledged you might have been looking in his direction.

You were tempted to avoid his eye contact in embarrassment when he finally put on his Sheikah suit and caught you staring, but when you realised he was pointing at the herd of horses blankly (like stripping in front of someone didn’t even phase him) you decided against it.

‘What?’ you mouthed (trying to act like it didn’t phase you either).

He pointed to each of the animals in turn: first to one colored in grey, then black, and then finally at two with a deep bay coat. In all honesty, you were yet to get the image of Link’s near-naked body out of your head, so it surprised you when the horse at your side snorted by your ear. Still half-dazed, you gave it some attention by letting your fingers trail through it’s mane. It looked like Link wanted you to pick the one you liked the look of, which was a nice sentiment really, when he could have just picked the closest one and had it over and done with.

You looked them over again, and they were all almost identical. Choosing one seemed to be solely a matter of appearance.

As you were thinking it over, Link’s horse craned its muzzle into your hand, and the sheer brightness of its white face in your periphery caught you off guard. 

Perhaps you thought, giving it another few strokes, it'd be nice for yours to provide contrast. 

 

* * *

 

“Have you got a name for it?” Link asked.

You looked ahead, hands firm on the purple bridle of Link's steed.

“Name? Oh, for the horse? No, not yet.”

The road took you northward, where Link mentioned the nearest stable would be. He was seated on the newly acquired and yet-nameless black horse, because what little he managed to teach you about horse riding on the fly was not enough to stop you from getting scared of its frequent bucking, lack of saddle, and constant steering away from the road.

“I'll ride him until we register him at the stable,” he'd said, “and he'll warm up to us by then.”

You were inclined to believe him. There was a softness in the way he rode, even after three and a half hours; firmly, his hands would resist the horse’s rebellious veering, and then gently, his voice would bring reassurance when its route was corrected. A part of you wondered whether this was part of his training as a knight, or if he was just good with animals. You kind of hoped it was the latter. (He seemed more personable that way.)

“Does yours have a name?” you asked, looking up, distracted by the vastness of the sky above you for the umpeenth time that day. It was past noon now, drawing closer to evening.

There was a strange hesitation in his voice at first, like he had to decide between telling you and keeping it to himself.

“He’s called Mipha,” he eventually replied.

“Mipha,” you repeated, feeling it on your tongue. Something in the word tugged at your memory. You could have sworn you’d heard it before, but every attempt to put a face to the vague feeling of familiarity ended in failure - with faraway thoughts of blue clouding your peripherals. You pet the stallion’s neck, and it snorted in satisfaction.

“Isn’t that a girl’s name?” you asked offhandedly, phrasing it like it was the punchline to a joke. Link rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly, but never said anything.

 

* * *

 

Two hours before dusk was the first time you saw other people.

They appeared as vague shapes at first, sat around a flickering campfire in the shadow of a tall oak. There was unbridled excitement in the way you pointed them out to Link, because it was an opportunity to finally talk to someone else, to have a conversation that wasn’t one-sided or full awkward pauses.

“We should introduce ourselves,” you said, and expected a similar excitement in response (albeit toned down, admittedly) but he narrowed his eyes at them a way that unnerved you. Still, when you went ahead he dragged along without protest, shifting his foot about restlessly on the stirrups of the black horse. One of the people sat up when you came close enough, and you waved at them when they looked your way.

They waved back.

“Are the two of you travelers?” the one who had sat up asked: a girl dressed in a leather corset and white, cotton dress.

You nodded your head emphatically.

“Nice to meet you,” you said. She smiled up towards you and pat the ground beside her.

“Feel free to sit down, please. It’s been a while since we’ve had the chance to talk to other travellers.”

The boy sat to her right nodded dazedly. He was writing in a journal of sorts, a pretty moleskine thing that rested on his lap. You made a move like you were going to get over your horse, but Link looked at you like it wasn’t a good idea, and you changed your mind.

“I’m afraid we probably shouldn’t,” you said, apologetically. “We’re kind of in a hurry.”

This time it was the boy that spoke, and the straight, black hair that covered his face fell to either side as he looked up.

“That's no problem. If you have the time though, we’d appreciate if you could at least stay long enough to have something to eat.” He held up his journal. “I write traveller accounts in here, so I always welcome any tales that come our way.”

You looked towards Link for permission again, but this time, he just shrugged.

“Alright then, just for a minute,” you said with a smile, and the boy instructed the girl to fetch some fruit from the rucksack they'd propped up behind the oak. Eager to settle down and rest, you leant forward in the saddle to lie against Mipha’s neck.

“Have the two of you been travelling for long?” the boy asked, tapping his pencil on the cover of the journal.

“Believe it or not, I just set out this morning,” you said, and laughed a little. The boy looked surprised, and his hair fell over his face again when he started jotting things into his journal.

“Him, too?” He questioned.

“No, he’s been at this for much longer,” you answered, honestly. He muttered something noncommittal, and licked his fingers to get turn to a clean page.

“Would you mind telling me what relationship the two of you have? You seem a bit young to be married, if you pardon me for assuming.”

“Oh no, it’s nothing like that at all,” you replied. Your next sentence was broken up by a mixture of fillers, of ems and ums and half-finished words, because you had not even begun formulating the terms of your relationship with the hero in your _head_ , let alone into words. “We’re just acquaintances,” you declared. “But it’s kind of a long story.”

Link realised the conversation might take some time, so he slumped forward to rest against the neck of the black horse, and watched a sparrow take off from the grass with a particularly loud swipe of Mipha’s tail. He was not as captivated by conversation as you seemed to be, so his eyes trailed away, to the sky, the mountains, the trees, and the bundle of crumpled clothes peeking out from behind the oak tree you hid in the shade of.

Crumpled clothes?

He looked them over again, and sure enough, all dumped into a messy pile was a white, cotton dress, and a leather corset. Link sat up, unnerved, and his eyes scanned up and down, left and right, until just barely, behind a foliage of thick, green, oak leaves, he saw the colour of deep red.

“Down!”

His voice was so sudden you ducked on reflex, and an arrow whooshed over your head and hit the ground beside you. The neutral frown in his face steeled further to a tough grimace. He yelled at you again, but this time it was to stay back, and you tugged backwards on the reins of the horse out of little more than panic. Quickly, he jumped off his horse and aimed upwards, but the arrow he shot landed somewhere in the leaves without hitting anything.

It took a couple of seconds for your breath to return, but when it finally did, you pulled the reins of the horse backwards. Never before had you shot an arrow while mounted, but your bow and three arrows from your quiver were at the ready, nestled in between your middle fingers. You aimed them at the boy, but he was nowhere to be found, the only evidence of his existence: a black, moleskin journal that lay in the grass, unceremoniously tossed on the ground.

Suddenly, you heard a bang and a whoosh, and then everything filled with smoke. Vaguely, you saw figures, like puppets in a shadow play, and then the clash of metal. Something grabbed you from behind and dragged you off your horse. You kicked against it, but it didn’t let go, instead tugging your hands behind your back in an effort to immobilise you.

“Get off!” you yelled. When you elbowed its chest, he grunted (it was a man's voice, you could tell) and his knee curled into you, smashing you in the ribs. The other elbow you aimed behind you met its mark with a sickly pound, and the man holding you fell backwards and cradled his face.

You coughed and grappled for your bow before aiming it at the assailant. Even before he smoke completely cleared, you readied it to shoot, but another shadow jumped at the figure and stabbed something into its chest. Through shock, your feet stumbled backwards in a tangle, and you felt your back hitting the horse behind you in the mess. After a few shallow breaths, the thick smoke in the air thinned out. It was Link who emerged victorious, crouched on top of the body on the ground, broadsword plunged into it’s chest.

He used his sword to lift himself up.

“Are you - ” he started, and paused to get his breath back. “Are you alright?”

You nodded.

“They were Yiga,” he said, taking another few haphazard breaths. “They dress up as travellers and ambush people who stop to -”

“I - I’m aware.” You cut him off. The irregular thrum of your heartbeat rang in your throat. “I’ve heard the stories.”

Link sighed and unsheathed the sword from the man’s body, and it came out of his chest with a nauseating, wet slosh, bottom half almost entirely drenched in blood. Link looked at you, completely unbothered by it.

“You should put that back,” he said, and gestured to your bow. The adrenaline rushing out of your body left tremors in your fingers that ran all the way up to you shoulders. It was debatable whether you’d have been able to shoot anything with your bow shivering so aimlessly (even at point blank range), so the less stubborn part of you was grateful Link took it upon himself to make the finishing blow. A little embarrassed, you swung the bow around to your back.

Off to the side was another body, again dressed in a deep, red costume that covered even its face. Probably the girl. So she was taken care of, too.

You breathed a sigh of relief, and the tremors stilled a little.

“That was tense,” you said.

Link took no notice of the bodies. Instead, he walked around to oak without so much as a waver in his steps, and started rummaging about in their rucksacks. He held up a couple of rupees, and stuffed them into his own bag - returning to the rucksack with a grimace before lifting three bright bushels of bananas from it.

“What have you found?” you asked. The question was casual but your voice still jittery, cracking at the edges with a fear that had yet to dissipate. A puddle of blood pooled around the closest body, sinking into the earth.

He held up the bananas, and you laughed, nervously.

 

* * *

 

The two of you had begun mounting your horses when you turned back around, a bag packed full to the brim of bananas hanging from the saddle of Link’s horse. The bodies lay strewn over the field, and although they did not fill you with fear, or dread, there was still something sad about how unceremoniously they lay. Their masks covered their faces, and the one who you assumed to be the girl held her weapon limply in her fingers.

“Shouldn’t we bury them?” you asked, looking them over with a downcast expression. Link followed your gaze, and his eyes ran over the grass like he was inspecting the view.

“Why?” He questioned.

You blinked at him.

“You mean you haven’t been?”

He looked at you vacantly, like he couldn’t decipher your intentions. Eventually, he shook his head, and shifted about uncomfortably on the saddle of the black horse he’d got onto. You stopped to think about it, and the bodies waited, as still as ever.

“I mean, I - I kind of understand. They did try to kill us," you trailed off, and a bout of awkward silence followed you. There was a second wherein you looked around briefly, scanned the grass, the path, and the oak tree. “But shouldn't we at least do it for the sake of the next person that has to stumble upon them?”

Link considered it in silence for a while longer. It was clear he was flipping between making the decision, trying to decide whether it was worth it. Even when he finally gave in and gestured for you to get off your horse, the systematic way with which he did everything made it seem as though he was doing it to humour you more than anything. When he swung his body over the saddle and dismounted his horse, he grabbed a shield roped to his horse’s saddle, handed you another one, and started using his to scoop out earth from under the oak tree.

With you working overtime to catch up to him, the two of you finished digging holes big enough to hold the bodies by the time an hour and a half had passed, and filling them back up only took another twenty or so minutes. After the bodies had been buried however, his self-assurance disappeared into thin air. He kept looking in your direction, like he was waiting to be told what else to do.

“Have you ever been to a burial, Link?” you asked, trying to make your tone sound as kind and soft as possible.

He shook his head, and something tugged at your chest. You realised with a disheartening lurch in your throat that he’d probably never had time to grieve over the deaths of the other Champions. It was during the tragedy that he collapsed, after all (still laden with ten different layers of adrenaline) and Impa had to carry him away to the Shrine of Resurrection.

When Paya had told you that the boy had woken up with memory loss so severe he could not remember his past, you felt bad for him at first. However, now that you looked over at his blank face and thought about it properly, perhaps his memory loss was a blessing. Otherwise, he would have had to wake up still grieving over a tragedy everyone else had recovered from a hundred years ago.

“That’s no problem,” you said, still with a soft, small voice. “I’ll walk you through it”.

You told him to kneel, to pray to the Goddesses and to entertain a moment of silence, to place a flower and a rock on top of the graves to mark them, reassuring him at most every step.

It kind of looked like he didn’t get it, what with the blank way he kept looking up at you, completely out of his depth like a fish out of water. But maybe in time, he would.

 

* * *

 

“Hey, Link,” you called out to him.

He looked over his shoulder back at you. The dark fabrics of his Sheikah suit faded into the dusk behind him - mixed into a pretty wash of purple and blue. A while ago, you’d mentioned that the two of you should probably start easing off to find a place to rest for the night, but he’d insisted the stable was nearby. You could see it on the horizon now, the light of a campfire in front of it spewing plumes of smoke into the sky.

You plucked another banana from the bushel in your hands, and threw it towards him. There’d not been a dinner break for either of you as of yet (if you were honest, the Yiga incident put you off suggesting it) but you’d at least tried to keep the two of you fed with odd fruits and snacks. The whole thing felt a bit overbearing, but Link seemed happy enough with it, taking whatever food you had to offer when you threw it over.

“I can’t wait to get to a proper bed,” you drawled, in between a yawn and a stretch. A sharp pain from your rib after the stretch caused you to keel over and clutch at your chest, breath hitching and locking before it even left your throat. Link looked over at you, concerned.

“I’m fine, just a sore muscle,” you muttered, and were quite happy to hear that your voice didn’t sound nearly as chopped up as it felt. It was no broken rib (fortunately, although it sure felt like it at the Yiga soldier's initial kick) but there was no way your skin wouldn’t flare up in clouds of purple and yellow the next morning. You ran your fingers over where you imagined the bruise coming into existence, stretching over your skin. 'Like the dawn on the horizon, you thought,' with no absence of humour.

Link was still inspecting you when you looked up at him. It felt a little too concerned for your liking, so you tried to change the subject.

“You don’t think they’d have a restaurant on hand, do you? I’m feeling kind of peckish.”

He shook his head.

“How about cooking utensils? Do they have any food on site? Breakfast in bed?”

“There’s a cooking pot and a campfire,” was all he said, before turning back around. You looked ahead, and the stable was still too far to make out anything as small as a cooking pot, but you could definitely see the campfire, still flickering in a distant spark of orange light.

So you’d have to cook the food yourself, in other words.

What things did you have on hand?

It was pretty easy to scrap a meal up out of anything, but you wanted something special for your first night in the woods, if not for any other reason than to prove that it was possible to have nice meals out in the middle of nowhere. For the rest of the way there, you rummaged about in Link’s food bags, almost all filled to the brim with ingredients - some of which you hadn’t seen for years. It was out of familiarity that you settled for a bushel of Tabatha wheat and rock salt, and then your eyes trailed over to the bag of bananas peeking out of the bag roped to Mipha’s saddle.

“Link?” you called out to him, for the second time that evening.

He looked back towards you.

“Have you ever had banana bread?”

 

* * *

 

The night sky had been cloudy for a while. A thick cover of grey had settled above, a colour so washed out that even the black silhouettes of fir trees encasing it around the horizon surpassed it in intensity. You’d never thought of stars much while in Kakariko, but there was something sad about their absence now, out in the open. Even the moon struggled against the thickness of clouds, disappearing and reappearing at their mercy.

“The bread will have finished baking in a bit,” you said, taking the pot lid off for just long enough to gauge the colour of the crust on the surface. With a concentrated grimace, you put the lid back on and spread some hot charcoal onto the top of it with a rusty fork.

Link was sat a couple of feet away from you, with his back turned to the campfire. He was crouched over something, and upon closer inspection, you realised it was the device you’d seen him take out before.

“What is that?” you asked, leaning over his shoulder.

For a second the muscles in his arms tightened, like he’d forgotten you were even there. It was only when he looked into your eyes and recognised you as not a beast or monster that he relaxed.

“A Sheikah slate,” he replied, and tilted it in your direction so you could see more of it.

Some of the shapes took on forms that made more sense, and it was easier to see the whole thing as vaguely map like. You were happy with it for a few seconds, before Link fiddled with it to change the picture, and then it stopped making sense again.

“How does it work? It looks like it’s moving.”

“It’s uncovered ancient technology.” He put his finger down at a section on the screen, and this time it went to an ordered to-do lists of tasks you assumed to be quests. “I’ve been told it was created by the Sheikah.”

You looked at it, equally (if not more) confused than you had been before. He held it out to you a bit sheepishly, and you took it slowly into your hands, conscious of doing anything to break or damage it. Rotating it did not make the screen change, so you tried to push and pull at little elevated buttons sticking out from the side.

“I can’t even begin to imagine how this thing works,” you said. Pressing the buttons flipped through a series of menus, one of them holding neatly organised reconstructions of environments in little boxes. You selected one, and it expanded, filling the whole screen with a picture of a flowering field. "Wow," you exclaimed, tracing your finger over it. "That’s such a beautiful painting."

Link, who was prior concentrated on scouting the area for any wild animals, looked over your shoulder to see what you meant.

“That’s a photograph,” he said.

“What’s the difference?”

It took him a second to give you an answer, and you’d managed to convince yourself he was going to leave the question hanging before he finally replied.

“It takes less time to take a photo than it does to paint something.”

If you were completely honest, his explanation shrouded the thing further into mystery. You fiddled about with the device for long enough to get the camera up however, and with enough struggling, managed to take a impression of your feet.

“Oh, look!” You said, scrolling through the gallery of images to expand it. “I’ve just done one now.”

There was something a little familiar in your fascination with the device, and a vague spot in the back of his mind enjoyed seeing it. He returned to seriousness when it was time to look around, however, and he narrowed his eyes at the horizon to make sure the sound he'd heard from the bushes was nothing more than a bird.

“You’ve been to all these places?” you asked, and he noticed you were back to fiddling with the gallery.

“I’ve been to a few. Some were already on the device.”

You fiddled with the album some more, opening a couple of images in turn until you got to one at the bottom right of the menu, to which the screen filled with the vivid green of a forest.

“I think I recognise this place,” you muttered.

Link glanced over at the picture, and then expectantly turned to you.

“Yeah,” you continued, and looked over your shoulder to where you could hear the running water of the river. “These are the little woods just over that steam.” You pointed in said direction, somewhere into the darkness.

Link could make out the bank a little more clearly than you, courtesy of his sharper, Hylian eyes.

“I used to go heron hunting over there when I was still --” you trailed off, and put your hand on your arm. “When I was younger.” Somewhat absentmindedly, you handed Link the Sheikah slate.

“We’ll go there in the morning,” Link said, looking at the picture.

“Why?” you asked. He met your eyes, but there was nothing you could sensibly read from them.

“Whenever I go to places shown in the pictures, I regain bits of my memory,” he explained, and held up the album you were scrolling through. “I think they were all pictures princess Zelda took, when I was still her escort.”

“I see. That does sound important.” There was quiet for a little while, while you stared up at the clouds in the sky, and Link went back to fiddling with the Sheikah slate silently.

You used a branch to pick up the hot pot lid, and a powerful scent of fresh bread and bananas filled the air. Just to make sure it was done, you plucked it with a finger, and the crust pushed in and upwards like well-baked cake.

“I think it’s finished, you said, and tipped it out onto a slate of wood.

Link took the first bite, and the two of you ate in silence for a little while - enjoying the warmth and sweetness of the bread against your tongues. It was only fifteen minutes in, as you were half-way through summarising the day in your head that something started bugging you.

“Link, what happened earlier, with the horses?”

He looked at you like had no idea what you were on about.

“I mean before you caught one. Do you usually get changed right in the middle of a field?” you asked, hoping that would clarify things for him.

He thought for a second, and nodded.

“Really? That’s - somehow not the answer I was expecting.” When you spent more time considering it, however, you supposed it made sense. After all, if you'd spent the majority of your life travelling alone, you probably wouldn't have a very developed sense of privacy either.

“Why is that?” he asked.

You cut yourself another slice with the sharp edge of an unused sword you’d dug out of the bottom of Link’s rucksack before you spoke again. “Well, It’s just, your body's private, isn’t it? It’s something that’s yours, and no one else’s. You shouldn’t want any random person being able to see it.”

Link didn’t look at you when he answered.

“My body isn’t mine,” he said, like it was obvious. “It’s there for the benefit of other lives, and has been ever since I was given the honour of being Princess Zelda’s Knight.”

Your face turned sour.

“But your body isn’t just a tool," you said.

When he looked at you, there was no expression on his face aside from cold, analytical distance - like he couldn’t understand what you were saying. He took another bite out of the bread, but didn’t reply.

 

* * *

 

The loaf of bread was half-eaten when the two of you were finished. You wrapped the remains into a cloth and tied them with a string into a bag, before putting it away for the night and mentioning offhandedly that the rest could be served with butter for breakfast tomorrow. Putting out the fire with dirt brought a chill to the air, and you were quick to remark that it would be best to rent a room for the night as soon as possible.

“I’ll just go and get changed into something more comfortable,” you said. Link nodded in acknowledgement, and you scouted for places where you could get changed without having anyone see. You went into the dark a little (albeit not too far; you didn’t fancy being ambushed by anything that might have been hiding further out). You turned back around, feeling safe that the darkness would be a sufficient curtain for you to strip off your clothes and fumble about to put on something looser.

A normal human being wouldn’t see anything in almost pitch darkness (which is why it took you an extra couple of minutes of groping about to make sure your clothes weren’t on backwards) but you still couldn’t shake the feeling that you were being watched. When you turned around to face the stable however, there was no beast or monster in your peripherals, nor was there a Yiga footsoldier watching you from the roof of the stable. There was just Link, and the back of his head, after you caught the half-turn of his head from your direction to somewhere else.

Did he - ?

No way.

You picked your day clothes from the ground, and (eager to get out of the darkness) jogged back to the stables.

Link said nothing, but there was a skittishness to his gaze that seemed more suspicious than anything that could have came out of his mouth.

“Are you not going to get changed, Link?” you asked, and he shook his head. “Are you sure? You clothes look comfortable enough to sleep in, but it might be a good idea to wash them in the river so they’re fresh for tomorrow.” He waited for a second, clearly again in thought.

“Would they be dry by then?” He asked. You cringed on the inside a little (because had this guy ever done his laundry?) but nodded. Mentioning that the morning sun would dry them out in no time, you gestured out to where you would hang them up .

“Alright,” he said, and started stripping almost immediately. With resignation, you sighed inwardly and looked away, because as much as Link didn’t seem to mind when you saw him in his shorts, you could hardly say you shared his sentiments. He held his clothes in your hands, but when you stuck your arm out for them, he didn’t seem to understand what you meant.

“I’ll wash them for you,” you explained, tilting your head towards the river. “I imagine you should probably be getting on with other stuff.” He processed it for a second or two before nodding and handing the pile over. “You can ask me to help you out with chores, you know. That’s more or less what I’m here for.”

Link didn’t respond.

If you could be completely honest, you were starting to get a little sick of his blank stares by the time you noticed he was looking at you. It was always difficult to know what to think of them: whether you should elaborate because he was confused, hold your tongue because he was sick of your voice, or just launch into a staring contest until he realised how awkward it felt to be under someone's scrutiny for almost every reply.

You decided to elaborate this time, perhaps for no other reason than because you liked talking.

“Don’t be afraid to get a little greedy with asking me to scavenge or hunt or something while you’re sleeping.” You peered over at his rucksacks, and remembered digging about in them earlier in the evening to find food, only to come across several glass bottles of coloured liquid. “I saw you carrying around elixirs, too,” you continued. “Pretty sure making those is like cooking with gross ingredients, so I reckon I could pull it off with a few tries.”

“I don't think they work on humans,” he said.

You peered over at him, and he was still staring.

“Yeah, that’s fine. But if you can make use of them as a Hylian, it’s probably worth it to have some spare, right?”

Again, he stared at you with that blankness, and God you wished there was a casual way of ripping your hair out. What was he so unsure about? Your good intentions?

"Thank you." He said, eventually.

"It's fine. I haven't even started yet." He didn't respond for the umpteenth time, but at least you could find grace in the he’d finally settled his pointed stare someplace that wasn't you.

(You decided not to elaborate this time, but maybe just because you wanted to get started on washing the clothes before the night was over.)

The two of you separated with an unceremonious goodbye. You washed clothes at the riverside, while he sorted through his materials and equipment at the extinguished campfire.

 

* * *

 

When it was time to retire for the night, you dragged Link along to buy two beds in the stable, and the rupees for it came out of your own pocket.

“You probably need the money for equipment, right?” you asked, when he looked at you like he  wasn’t sure what to think of it. After all, it had been one of his bigger complaints when you first brought up the sleeping in a stable, even though it made little sense to you at the time.

The beds were barely soft enough to sleep on, but you honestly couldn't have cared less. It felt surreal to finally rest on something with more substance than the hard leather surface of a saddle, and you wouldn’t be caught taking it for granted. It had been a rough day, all in all.

“We’ll register the horses in the morning,” Link said, and you noticed he was just getting under the covers himself. He was still in his boxers last time you looked, so it was somewhat of a relief to see him covered with the quilts.

“Alright,” you mumbled back at him. The night was a little chilly, but it was nothing that pulling your covers further up your body wouldn't fix.

"Do you think you might have a name for your horse by then?" He asked. You automatically tried turning towards him, but he was facing away from you, on a bed two spaces away. Instead, you looked out of the tent, past the swamp and the grass, upwards of the hills and trees, and up to the mountains - where you were sure that nestled in them was a small village who waited for your return.

“How about Papaya?” You suggested.

You couldn’t see Link’s face, but the nature of his sentence played with an amused edge that seemed out of place coming from him, especially against the contrast of his impassive tone.

“Isn’t that a girl’s name?” he asked.

You smiled into your pillow.

* * *

 

Oddly, even though the night was silent, you found the goosebumps never came. You didn’t feel unsafe or abandoned, like you could get lost among the trees and never be found again. (Even though physically, you were closer to any forest than you had been for years.)

It was definitely because of him, that much was certain. But you wondered why that was: he never said anything; never offered words of comfort; never went out of his way to to start a conversation or reply with anything of more value than the boring, predictable minimum; in fact, talking with yourself usually proved to be livelier, without long spans of tight-lipped quiet wherein nothing was said.

The silence was still there. You knew that. So it mustn't have been the silence that he staved.

 


	4. soft

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> i'm only half joking when i say that finally getting this chapter out felt like giving birth.  
> i've got a lot to say here, but i'm going to save it. when this story is up in its entirety, i plan on writing a very long author's note and putting it up as a link somewhere. that way, i can save all of my thoughts as i'm writing and present them where there's no chance of spoilers. as it is, apologies for the wait, and i hope this behemoth of a chapter (13,000 words. that's very nearly 30 pages) makes up for it at least a little. thank you.

The next morning, the two of you got dressed in silence.

When you realised your penchant for conversation had almost completely disappeared within the span of a single night, it caught you by surprise. Most unpredictable however, was that it wasn’t just a case of being put off by Link’s aversion to small talk. If anything, he seemed restless compared to you, as though there was something on his mind that he couldn’t bring himself to articulate. During breakfast, he took every opportunity wherein you were distracted with something to let his eyes skim over you – enough that turning around to find him staring became somewhat of a constant.

“Link, is anything bothering you?” you asked, but he cut the question off abruptly by shaking his head.

Without the distraction of chatter, leftovers from last night’s banana bread were finished quickly. Within half of hour of waking up, the two of you set out to the forest over the river in search of a new memory. You were seated on your respective horses this time around, Link on Mipha, and you on the newly christened Papaya, who must have been offended with the gender discrepancy in his name enough to take it out on you by straying constantly. You spent most of the journey sheepishly trailing behind Link, thoroughly embarrassed by how obediently Mipha kept to the road in comparison.

Within an hour, you’d built up quite an animosity for Link’s horsemanship. Admittedly, you may have never ridden a horse before, but there was definitely something unnatural in the practised fluidity of his tugs and kicks, an assuredness that suggested he’d be capable of directing most wild animals in Hyrule, let alone just the horses.

“You’re a real animal whisperer, aren’t you?” you quipped offhandedly, as the horses were making their way over Rebonae Bridge. It was the most pointless thing you’d said all morning, but the uneventful trip to the other side of the stream was beginning to bore you.

“Animal whisperer?”

He glanced back at you, clearly confused. Probably should have figured he’d be no good with idioms.

“It’s just a name for someone who’s really, really good with animals,” you clarified, and he nodded, before turning back around. Your eyes stayed on his face for a while after, if only to figure out what was on his mind. If the gentle creases in his eyebrows were anything to go by, he was still hung up on the expression, putting more effort than should have been reasonable into understanding it.

Link was becoming easier to read, you noticed.

Whether it was due to his growing familiarity around you, or thanks to your new-found experience with picking up his tells, you couldn’t quite say, but you were beginning to recognise little inflections in his voice that gave way to a more reactive personality than you thought him capable of at first.

“Don’t think about it too hard,” you said, and literally hand-waved it – something you regretted as soon as Papaya snorted against you tugging on the reins and shook his head with enough force to pull them out of your hands. You scrambled to pick them up so frantically your hands missed the mark by a few inches at least, and the stallion already looked like he had half a mind to take off when you finally pulled them back to your saddle. “I was just joking anyway.” You sighed, and flopped back into your seat.

Link was, quite predictably, staring at you openly when you looked. Judging from the amused glint in his eyes, he probably saw your horse almost go rogue at your clumsiness too. You found yourself getting a little embarrassed.

“In that case, I think you’re a food whisperer,” he said, and the little dimples at the base of his cheeks almost suggested a smile.

 

* * *

 

The grove you arrived at was fresh with the smell of mushrooms.

“I think the picture I saw was taken somewhere around here,” you said, slowing Papaya down to a halt. The stallion reared defiantly, tugging the reins inwards, and you were almost too afraid to attempt dismounting until Link paved the way by jumping off Mipha and landing neatly on the forest floor.

“I’ll have a look around,” he said.

You got down with a wobble, and preoccupied with a cluster of mushrooms, jogged to the root of a tree.

“Alright. I’ll be trailing behind you.” You inspected the mushrooms before pulling them up, turning their orange caps to face the sun. “I’m gonna be looking for ingredients.”

There was an affirmative grunt from his direction, and then a soft thump of footsteps as he went his own way, systematically comparing the picture on his Sheikah Slate to his surroundings.

All in all, the mushrooms were kind of disappointing.  Nothing remarkable in terms of texture, and a little on the old side to play around with, but you could still probably steam them with meat for something to fill your stomach.  It wouldn’t be a complex meal, but you could hardly play gourmet chef for the entirety of your journey with Link when all you had at your disposal were wild ingredients.

You went back to the horse to retrieve a sack full of fruit tied to the saddle and swung it over your shoulder, ready to fill it with whatever you found lying around.

There were a couple more on the way, so you dotted around, picking up three bushels of Hylian herbs and folding your top into a basket at the waist to hold whatever wouldn’t fit in the sack. When you finally caught sight of Link again (stood with his back to you some distance away), twenty minutes had passed at least, and you were carrying enough herbs to season today’s meal and the next three that came after.

“Oh, there you are!” You called out, adjusting the sack of food at your back so you could jog towards him. He gave no indication that he heard you, so you called out to him once again before coming close, not keen to scare him and find yourself impaled on a sword.

“Have you found the place on the photo?”

Still no answer. A mild sense of discomfort overcame you; although going by without a verbal response was nothing new, Link would normally at least substitute his words for nods or gestures.

“Um, hello?” You stepped to his side, but found that even his expression was ridged, locked into unsettling blankness. “Link? Is everything alright?”

You reached over to touch his shoulder gently. His arm twitched in response, but he was still frozen in time - face steeled into an unmoving expression so wooden it bordered on catatonic. You looked down at his arms, and as a jilted breath got stuck in your throat along with the thump of your rising heartrate, found that they were shaking.

You took a step forward and tried to shake him awake, but he remained unresponsive. His hands tightly gripped the Sheikah slate at arm’s length in front of him, and with some level of concern, you noticed that the image displayed on it was a photo of the place his eyes were so blankly focused on.

“Link?”

His face contorted.

An ugly, concerned expression, still subtle with its delivery, but much too oversaturated in emotion for something you’d ascribe to him. Not of disgust, and not of anger, but of a deep sadness and pity.

You tugged him into yourself immediately, letting go of your shirt’s hem and the sack tied around your back in favour of wrapping your arms around him. Tenderly, your hands drew circles into his spine, and if the way the shiver in his arms eased and he grabbed at your shirt to pull you inwards was anything to go by, he was grateful for it.

“Hey, hey, it’s fine,” you said, because you didn’t know enough about the situation to say anything else; he must have been reliving something you couldn’t understand, something that you were never really meant to be a part of.

He shook his head.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, numbly; a soft mumble, hushed enough that you felt it most through the vibrations of his voice against your collar. “I failed,” again, the warmth of his breath trailed across your skin.

“It’s okay.” It came out instinctively, directed entirely by an almost visceral need to settle him down. “Look, I’m here. We’re safe. Everything’s alright.”

Softly, you rubbed his back.

Link settled against you, and over time: his breath returned to a slow rhythm; his hands lost their iron grip on your shirt, and eventually, when his senses returned to him, he pushed away from you almost frantically, eyes glazed with remnants of whatever numbness had hit him so forcefully before.

You sighed in relief.

“Are you okay?” Anyone would recognise the sweeping current of concern in your voice.

“Yes,” he said, a little too quickly, and looked around himself to reconfirm his surroundings. “I’m sorry.” There was a real guilt in his voice that wasn’t just a result of awkwardness or politeness.

“What happened?” you asked, although the glimpse you caught of Link’s Sheikah slate answered the question before he did.

He hesitated briefly, neutral frown lining his lips.

“It happens with every new memory.”

It felt like a half-truth, what with the way he wouldn’t meet your eyes and his face set into marble-like rigidity, like he was desperately grasping at a neutral expression. You wanted to prod, ask him what the memory was, because finding him so severely unresponsive was enough of a shock for your adrenaline to throb through your body even now. But he didn’t seem to want to talk about it, and you supposed that whatever closeness came about from the little time you’d spent together wasn’t enough to get him to open up to you.

You were worried for him; a feeling that stayed even as he insisted that it was nothing at all, as he apologised for making you concerned, and as the two of you returned to your horses. He led the way, and you trailed behind, never taking your eyes off him.

 

* * *

 

If he’d looked slightly caught up on something before, he was extremely distressed over it now, on the way to the Zora Kingdom. There wasn’t a single time that he wasn’t either deeply troubled, lost in thought, or staring at you with immeasurable concern, a look that ran shivers down your back regardless of how much it mirrored yours.

“Link, are you sure everything’s alright?” you couldn’t help but ask, when the rocky face of Crenel peak loomed over your right, and grey clouds swirled above your heads as thick blankets of premonition. The only emotion you could reliably read from him bordered around embarrassment, because the rest was buried in a nondescript haze of vagueness, of something that looked equally like concern as it did fear. Part of you was concerned you’d offended him with the question by pestering him with what might have been an excess of your good intentions. But the apprehension was lost in confusion when he finally responded.

“You should be more careful.”

“What?”

Honestly, it was so out of the blue that you couldn’t even tell if it was a response to your question. If anything, Link was more confused than you were, as though attempting to put his thoughts into words was a mysterious process of putting his feelings into a machine and standing at the other end until something came out; like he was trying to create a picture with broken, blunt tools that he’d never learnt how to use.

“I don’t want you to get hurt,” he said.

You wanted to say that it was a sweet sentiment, that you appreciated he was watching over you and showing concern for your wellbeing, but to be perfectly honest, it came out of nowhere and just perplexed you.

“What do you mean?” you asked.

His hands fiddled with the bridle, an odd, almost child-like gesture you struggled to make sense of.

“I can’t put you in danger. I have to protect you,” he explained, although it was hardly an explanation. It seemed to you like he was the one in need of protection, what with his little memory incident earlier, his incapability of settling into an acceptably normal routine, and the general clumsiness of his approach to social interaction, like a child being forced out from behind his parent’s leg to say hello to strangers. “So, you should let me handle everything,” he finished, and you were surprised he could say it with a straight face.

His attitude didn’t sit well with you. You had not set out on this whole journey to be protected, as he seemed to think. Rather, you saw someone who needed help, and internally made a promise set out to help them to the best of your ability. It was never the other way around.

You told him as much.

“I don’t need help with anything,” he replied.

You huffed and pulled Papaya’s reins inwards, abruptly stopping yourself short of pulling them taut in case it riled up the stallion enough to throw a hissy fit. You couldn’t help but take Link’s stubbornness personally. Whatever utility you had was being hand-waved as though you were just another one of his damsels-in-distress, and frankly, it was hard to take lying down.

“So, what’s the point of me being here? Am I just supposed to pretend I’ve forgotten how to use a bow while you’re out fighting monsters?” you asked, giving him a glare that came at as such despite your attempts to soften it. The question was not rhetorical, that much was clear. “I’m serious. There’s not much point in having me trail behind you all the time if I’m just going to be another thing for you to worry over. I’m trying to prevent putting any more stress onto you; this is exactly the opposite.”

To his credit, he did seem averse to the idea of you leaving, if the unsure expression on his face was any indication. He had agreed when you’d asked him to tag along, after all. There must have been some part of him that realised he’d be better off for it.

(It just wasn’t in the way you wanted it to.)

“Your food was good.”

A drawn-out length of silence. Had you been on foot, you’d probably have stopped dead in your tracks.

“What?”

“The meat you cooked was good. I wanted more of it,” he clarified, sheepishly.

You laughed, but it was more out of an attempt not to get offended than it was out of actual good humour. So that’s what he thought of you. Not that you could find it in yourself to blame him. The only time he’d seen you with your weapon drawn was in the kerfuffle with Yiga soldiers the day before, and neither the tremor in your fingers or the bruise that was still lining your chest had displayed much combat prowess.

“So, you don’t think the cook should be fighting?”

You wondered if Link was settling into reading your expressions with the same, gradual familiarity you were using to read his. Given the confusion with which you were being inspected (as though he couldn’t wrap his head around what you wanted him to say), you could only conclude the process wasn’t as smooth.

Tentatively, he nodded, and you hmmed to yourself, fully intent on proving him wrong.

 

* * *

 

The weathered path Link lead you down nestled you in-between two cliff faces to your right and left. Squeezed between them, the expensive blue sky whittled down to a thin strip, and the shadow of Crenel Peak cast itself onto the grass with a concentration that almost coloured the road black. There was something off in the air – a soft sense of alarm that twitched Papaya’s ears and had Link scanning his surroundings.

He always seemed to know before danger came; there was a practised sharpness to his Hylian instincts, something as much of a result of his race as it was experience. By the time your duller, human reflexes caught on, and your fingers reached the bow around your back, his sword was already drawn.

When you asked him what had prompted the unease, more than any apparition of danger, you were concerned that you’d have to spend another afternoon burying the body of another Yiga soldier. Link was too focused to respond, so the sky was where you found your answer, with the oncoming crackle of a pair of Electric Keese.

He reached for his bow, but this time it was you that was faster, and with a rush that was entirely a result of pride, you took aim and shot two arrows in quick succession. One after the other, the Keese fell to the ground with a thump.

Link stilled when he heard their squeals, predictably taken aback.

“I’m gonna go ahead and pick up their wings,” you said, doing your best not to look as smug as you felt.

Link stayed seated on his horse (although not without agitation) while you got down and pocketed the creatures’ wings and eyeballs. If he deciphered the passive-aggressive aspects of your little display, you could probably assume he wasn’t all that happy with you strutting your stuff. But it was all the more reason you had something to prove.

If he ever felt an urge to comment, he did not succumb to it.

 

* * *

 

Half an hour later, the clouds were still a swirling mass of grey in the sky – coiling into shadows that bore increasingly suspicious resemblance to rainclouds. The smell of humidity was unmistakable against the stillness of the air, suggestive of the calm before a storm. It was in your best interest to look for shelter soon, so you scoured the surroundings while Link went on ahead, seemingly unbothered by the steady darkening of the clouds.

Further down, Thims bridge stretched out over a steady river. The bank came into view as a face of greenery below you, and you were in the middle of figuring out how you could construct a makeshift tent out of some branches and the tarp before rhythmic beeping from Link’s direction scared you half to death.

“What the hell is that?” you asked, reaching for your bow.

Link stopped walking.

“It’s the Sheikah sensor,” he said. The beeping faded, so he adjusted the direction his horse was facing until it started again.

“Aha.” You nodded absentmindedly, with half a mind to leave it there until you thought better of it. “And what is that, exactly?”

“It tells me where shrines are located."

He gestured for you to follow him, but to your horror, he steered his horse off the road and in the direction the beeping was the loudest. Not only was it a detour (which the weather was not inclined towards), but it was off-road and into the hills: bad news for the obedience of your horse. Apprehensively, you led Papaya upwards, keeping a white-knuckled hold on the reins in case the horse took the absence of a clear road as an opportunity to stray.

Shrines, as far as you were aware, were ancient structures created by the Sheikah for the benefit of the hero. They gave him strength upon their completion (in forms that were apparently quantifiable, although you couldn’t guess how), but otherwise were just another responsibility for Link to wrap his head around.

(Something for you to help with, in other words.)

The irregularity of Crenel Hills made the horses nervous. There was pressure from the weather to get to the shrine as quickly as possible, so Link led you around hollow stumps of trees, upwards and to the side, where a relatively thin strip of rocks cropped out from the steep face of the hills. To its left was an almost vertical, rocky drop.

Link did not hesitate before leading Mipha towards it. It was apparent he had no fear of heights, no absence of courage. But even despite the predictability of his braveness, you couldn’t help but feel left behind by it.

You swallowed, nervously.

If there was ever a bad time for Papaya’s mood to turn sour, it was now; it would take only a single, wayward buck to have you fly over the precipice and split your body apart on the rocks below. Nevertheless, you urged your horse onwards. There was no way you would let Link think you were a burden, or a damsel-in-distress who could only follow him as far as they were comfortable with.

Still, when Papaya snorted, you couldn’t help but duck into your seat fearfully. Link must have seen it, because he stopped in his tracks to look behind at you.

“I’m fine!” you hurried to explain, a little too enthusiastically. “I just thought Papaya was getting antsy again.”

He thought for a little while, did his best to analyse your expression. It probably wasn’t too hard to pick up on the sheer panic on your face, but it still came as a surprise when Link moved slightly to the left (closer to the precipice) and told you to keep to his right, where the face of a mountain felt safe and inviting.

“Are you sure?” you asked, and he must have thought it an unnecessary question, because he didn’t respond.

 

* * *

 

The two of you left your horses when the road cut off at the steep face of a rock. A little bit of scrabbling and hunting about for the shrine brought you to the inside of a massive, hollow tree trunk, missing both a top and bottom.

“Wow,” you said, and put your bag on the ground, next to the shrine. “I can’t even imagine the size of the tree that left this thing.”

When you ran your hand over it, your fingers were met with an inexplicable smoothness, buffed by what you imagined to be decades (if not centuries) of rain and wind. If the entirety of Hyrule was full of equally strange formations, you could understand why being a traveller in Hyrule had such mass appeal. Coming across things like this on the daily would certainly make for good stories when it was time to move back to Kakariko.

By the looks of things, Link wasn’t nearly as entranced by the formation as you were. He gave the trunk barely a once-over before his attention returned to the shrine and he tapped the Sheikah slate on a panel that protruded from the ground.

The only other time you’d seen a shrine in person was near the Wetland Stables. It was an enigmatic, blue structure overlooking the two of you from the top of a hill that you’d have asked about had it not been for the streak of long silence in the morning. In contrast, this one was lined with glowing patterns of a pretty, amber colour that were as enticing as they were mysterious.

You rolled on the heels of your feet, impatiently waiting to usher into the shrine after Link.

To your great displeasure, he didn’t walk in straight away. A roll of thunder lolled in the background as he appraised you, and it made you all the more eager to walk in and get the shrine over and done with, so you could find shelter. But Link had other plans.

“Wait here,” he said. “It’s safer.”

You stopped dead in your tracks. “Wait, seriously? Will you not need help for whatever’s in there?”

Your disappointment must have showed on your face, because there was a little pause before he shook his head.

“Oh.”

A little bitterly, you motioned that you’d look after the supplies while he was in there and watched him go into the shrine without you. As soon as he was out of sight, you slumped against it with your arms folded. Maybe pulling grass from the ground was an overdramatic display of boredom, but the only thing to see it was a pink heron who chose that moment to land on the bark of the tree, so you could hardly bring yourself to care.

Slowly, you drew a bow from your back and promptly shot the heron down, predominantly so you could have something to marinate with the mushrooms for dinner later on, and partially because you were in a bad mood and wanted to take it out on something. Maybe karma was the final straw that sent the swirling rain down from the sky, first in cold, little droplets that you felt only on your bare skin, and then as a torrential downpour you couldn’t effectively hide from.

‘It’ll be fine’, you thought, curling up by the side of the shrine and holding a fern above your head as a make-shift umbrella, ‘Link will be back in no time.’

But by the time Link finally came out, as fresh as you’d ever seen him, the better half of an hour had gone, and you were soaked from head-to-toe.

“Someone took their time,” you said, and gestured to your wet clothes. They clung to your skin uncomfortably, and combined with the unintentional chatter of your teeth, served to make an aggressively blunt point. One that, nevertheless, seemed to go right over Link’s head, because he looked around you as though confused, trying to figure out what you were so annoyed over.

(To his credit, it was probably because as a child he’d undergone training so arduous that the rain meant nothing to him now, even when it pooled on the ground and seeped through his boots.)

“I’m freezing,” you clarified, and sharp alarm flashed across his face.

Immediately, he jogged to you and tried wrapping his arms around you. You pushed him away, taking a step back to evaluate the situation.

“What are you doing?”

“Saving you from freezing,” he responded, and there was an equal incredulity to his voice that suggested he didn’t expect your reaction.

“That’s… I don’t think that’s something I need saving from.”

The rain came as a downpour around you. It clattered against Link’s outfit with an unprecedented force, thrumming against the metal of his pauldrons and threading through his hair.

“It’s not?”

A tremor passed through your spine. Your cold clothes still hugged your back, and you felt water sloshing in your shoes. It wasn’t ideal, but realistically, it was nothing more than discomfort that could have been avoided if Link had let you follow him into the shrine.

You shook your head, teeth still chattering in your mouth, and promptly regretted even mentioning the rain.

 “I’m not made of sugar, you know. I’ll be fine,” was your last attempt at easing whatever urgency Link had assigned to the situation.

“But you’re cold,” he said.

“Well, yeah.”

You couldn’t exactly deny that.

Before you could tell him not to, Link sidled closer to you and wrapped his arm around your shoulders.

“Duck into me,” he said, and pulled you further in, towards his chest.

“Look, it’s really –”

“Please.”

You stilled against him.

“You need to be safe,” he clarified, with a hint of desperation that bled in crimson from a wound buried deep in his chest. His voice was raw, honest, and layered with scars crossing over in unison, things you couldn’t understand enough to untangle. Maybe he needed this. Maybe he was scared. Maybe, just maybe, this was entwined with whatever he saw in the last memory, the same thing that coated his eyes with a thin sheen of tears.

“Alright,” you said, and curled against him, not to bring yourself closer to him, but to bring him closer to you. “Warm me up.”

Truthfully, it wasn’t all that nice. The cold, wet metal of his armour was hard against your head, and the thin banner on top of his chainmail did little to mitigate it. But it worked where it mattered; Link’s body took the bigger brunt of the rain falling in your direction, and your shivers became less and less until you got back to your horses.

“Thanks,” you said, and he nodded, curtly.

 

* * *

 

“I think we should have a lunch break soon.”

The rain was still thick and heavy, pooling in horse tracks on the muddy path. You were wearing Link’s green doublet over your wet clothes, and although it was better than being entirely soaked through, you were still eager to sit down and get changed into something else.

“What will we be eating?” was his first question, and you couldn’t even say you were surprised.

“Heron, probably. Marinated in mushroom.”

Your hands were freezing, so you alternated holding the reins with each hand, taking turns to bring them back to the warmth of your pocket. When your horses turned a left on the path, you followed around the corner of the hill. In the distance, a Lizalfos circled the path, guarding a put-out campfire.

“That looks like a good place to set up camp, doesn’t it?” you asked, although it was more musing to yourself than expecting a genuine reply. “Just have to sort the Lizalfos out first.”

You withdrew your bow and almost felt the hairs on Link’s neck stand on end.

“I’ll do it,” he said, abruptly. You breathed in, deciding how best to breach the subject (because you could reliably kill the thing from here in one arrow and have everything over and done with), but he already looked like he had half a mind to take off.

“Just, hold on a minute.”

With what you hoped approximated determination, you readied your bow and leant forward in the saddle to get a better angle on the Lizalfos. It was far in the distance, but if you took your time aiming, a clean kill could be clinched without much trouble.

Just a little lining up now, checking to make sure the arrow was lined horizontally with the ground, and…

Link propelled Mipha forward so fast that you startled, and the arrow flew off somewhere to the side.

“Oh, in Hylia’s good name.”

Your hand immediately went to your back to grab another, but Link was already in your way, blocking your view of the Lizalfos.

“What are you doing?” you asked.

“It saw you.”

There was heavy urgency to his tone, as though merely making eye contact with the Lizalfos would have been enough to spell your doom.

“So what?” you asked. “He’s miles away.”

The monster cried out sharply, a sure sign that the two of you were spotted. You made a move to draw another arrow from the quiver at your back, but Link stopped you before you could prepare it.

“Get back.”

You groaned in frustration but listened to him anyway, pulling back on Papaya’s reins until the horse followed through to hide behind a hill. Link charged at the Lizalfos, and you watched him from a distance. Granted, the creature was fast, but it was no-where near fast enough to justify Link’s urgency; the whole thing reeked of overprotectiveness, like he was being manipulated by a hero syndrome that was too relentless to listen to reason. His sword clattered against the creature’s spear, and although his physical technique was sharp and efficient, it looked like his mind was elsewhere entirely.

You readied your bow again and promptly realised what it was that he was so distracted by.

“Stay back!” he yelled, almost as soon as you touched it.

“It’s a long-range weapon! I am staying back!”

He tried to say something again, but the Lizalfos caught him off guard and pinned him to the floor with a jump, launching its spear into his shoulder. Curse words seethed quietly from your breath as Link gasped and the Lizalfos pulled its spear back, leaving a sharp edge of dented armour pressing into his skin. The chain mail wasn’t pierced, but the impact was enough to smash his shoulder into the ground with a thud powerful enough to send the afflicted arm flopping like a ragdoll. The great-sword he was holding almost fell to the floor along with it.

Desperate to intervene, you made a move to grab your bow again—but didn’t even make it before Link noticed. It distracted him enough that he barely parried a blow which could have easily pierced the plate of his armour. You moved your hand back to your side, and he attacked like he was waiting for it, slashing the Lizalfos with a fast, sloppy stroke that ran across the centre of its chest.

A couple of seconds of thick tension, and then the creature fell on top of him.

You wasted no time in sighs of relief as you rushed towards Link, already reaching for a cloth from one of the satchels attached to Papaya’s saddle. Tremors in your legs made your feet feel like liquid as you jumped off Papaya and helped Link to push the creature from his body.

“Shit,” you said, taking a firm hold of his arm when the Lizalfos rolled to the side. “Are you alright? Did he hit you anywhere else?”

Link shook his head.

“Sit up,” you told him, and dragged his other arm upwards and from the wet floor before he could protest. “Take your armour off.”

You watched him try, but the dent in his shoulder plates pressed too deeply into his skin.

“Change of plans. Lift your arms up,” you said, and unbuckled the plates yourself, forcefully manoeuvring his shoulder off the dent. The chain mail was next to go, and after stripping him of the shirt that was underneath it, a veiny, almost black bruise revealed itself on his shoulder. It was painful, it must have been, but Link tried to force back the grim scowl from his face nevertheless.

Truthfully, you were too annoyed to say anything that didn’t run the risk of turning into a rant, so you stayed silent as you wrapped the cloth around him in a makeshift sling, pressing his arm against his side. The rain was receding, but it was still thick in the air when you walked him to the campfire prior guarded by the Lizalfos and told him to sit down on a blanket as you set the tarp up.

“I think that was just about the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen anyone do,” you said, when everything was ready.

Link was grasping his shoulder with the unaffected hand, settling against the provisional tent that shielded him from the remnants of the rain.

“I’m not hurt,” he remarked, and it took all of your self-control not to laugh. “I just need to eat something.”

“And that’s going to heal your smashed shoulder?”

Admittedly, you had your doubts; the black bruise on his shoulder was only worsening, expanding into a sickly yellow that was reaching even his back. He nodded, and you chose that moment to sigh outwardly.

“Alright,” even if you didn’t entirely believe him. “But just to be clear, it would have been so much easier if you let me shoot the damned thing,”

You laid them out, one by one, and took out dry firewood and Tabantha wheat from another, waterproof bag.

“It takes more than one arrow to kill a Lizalfos,” Link said. “They’re strong.”

You laughed, a shivery, chopped up cough that sounded only vaguely amused.

“Not if you know where to hit them.”

He didn’t reply, but you felt the unbroken intensity of his stare in the back of your skull as you struck flint repeatedly until it sparked. The wheat caught fire, and soft embers blew into the kindling, like flying petals of pretty, orange dust.

The rain fell about you.

Another sigh from your direction.

“I just don’t get it,” you said, as you stuffed the heron full of mushrooms. “I really don’t.”

With the way he was looking at you, you weren’t entirely sure he got it either. With yet another sigh, you pierced the heron with a branch and stuck it over the fire.

“Move along,” you said, and sat next to him.

 

* * *

 

It was a tight fit inside of the tent. Pushed against the bare arm of Link’s undamaged shoulder, there was barely enough room for you to sit up, but at least his proximity provided a sense of warmth that lessened the shiver brought about from the pitter of rain on the outside. The campfire burned with a steady certainty, and plumes of smoke brushed against the roof of the tarp that shielded it from the rain, congesting in thick, grey clouds that swirled in an out of existence.

“How’s your shoulder doing?” you asked.

Heron bones lay by the wayside of the fire, almost entirely picked clean. Link rolled the shoulder of note, and there was no hint of pain or inflexibility.

“It’s better. Thank you.”

“Let me have a look at it,” you said, because you didn’t entirely trust him, and crawled over Link to his other side. Carefully, you unwrapped the bandage from around his arm, taking your time to reveal that while it wasn’t perfectly healed, its shocking, veiny blackness had dramatically receded to pale yellows and browns.

“Yeah, it looks a lot less drastic.”

Already, cold air welled in your throat, scratching and tickling in your chest. When you moved back to your spot, a little cough burst from your mouth, and the suspicious gleam in Link’s eyes as he examined you was entirely too predictable.

You wondered if Hylians ever fell prey to illnesses like the common cold, or whether it was just a side effect of the relatively inefficient human immune system, something that (much like everything else) was slow, gradual, and took its time.

The racial differences had made themselves apparent with the Sheikah you grew up with in Kakariko, but in Link, they were merciless. It seemed like everything about Hylian bodies was better and faster: they could create forceful gusts of wind with only large leaves, heal nearly fatal wounds overnight, (or even faster when assisted by food), and carry overwhelmingly heavy equipment, all in incredibly lithe, compact bodies.

It was hard not to compare yourself. Link was entirely Hylian, and it showed, especially with the results of his rigorous training fluffing his innate prowess.

But he wasn’t perfect.

If anything, the discrepancy between his practised dexterity in combat and clumsy approach to communication was all the more apparent. He couldn’t prioritise, couldn’t read in-between the lines, couldn’t even consistently pay for an inn, and the whole Lizalfos incident was just the cherry on the cake.

“I’m happy you’re alright,” you said, and pulled your legs up so you could put your chin on your knees. There was a sincerity to your voice that surprised him. “But never do that again.”

You relaxed, settled against the tent and Link’s bare arm. The fire flickered, in turn from left to right, and the gentle undulations tickled your skin in a steady rhythm. He didn’t respond, but you hoped he understood nevertheless. When it came down to it, you weren’t capable of saving the world. No-body else was.

He stared at you: looked, and looked, and looked, but his mouth did not even twitch.

“Look,” you continued, and hovered one of your palms facing the floor outstretched, in a straight horizontal line in front of your chest. “My safety,” you said, emphasizing it. You brought the other hand up to the front of your face and held it in the same position. “Your safety.”

“Alright,” he said, but it was so blank and utterly devoid of understanding that you could only laugh.

“Notice how one is higher priority than the other?”

With a troubled expression, Link glanced you over once again, and nodded.

It wasn’t that you were intent on throwing your life away; not even close. But you could at least look after yourself enough that he could focus on the enemy in front of him without watching to make sure you didn’t accidentally piss it off.

“Are you sure?”

Another nod, this one a little more convincing.

Truthfully, you still doubted his comprehension, but you decided to let it go when the faint glow of an orange shrine caught your attention instead. It peeked out somewhere through the rain, from the middle of a small lake on a hill.

You pointed it out to Link, curious as to why it was still unfinished when it wasn’t all that difficult to see.

“It’s surrounded in brambles,” he told you.  

“Can’t you cut through them?”

“I’ve tried. They’re too tough.”

A vague mass of darkness surrounded the hill that the shrine was on, and you stared at it through the rain, trying to decipher it into brambles.

“How are you gonna get up there?”

“There’s a tower nearby. When it stops raining, I’ll climb it and glide there.”

Horrified at his response, you looked off to find a tall, white column rising from the ground, thrice the height of the hill the shrine was on.

The hypocrisy did not go over your head. Apparently, he was willing to climb the slippery, wet walls of an extremely tall tower (with no equipment nevertheless), and you couldn’t even cough without giving him a heart attack.

“I’m sure there’s got to be another way,” you said. There was a clear sense of expectation to his glance when he turned to you, as though you had the solution ready at hand. “I’ll think of something when the rain lets up, alright?” you suggested, and it placated him enough to turn his attention off you and onto the fire again. There wasn’t an immediate alternative path to the brambles that you could see from this distance; the thick mist of the rain did well to haze everything far away into an intangible, grey haze, but with some generous squinting, you could at least make out the form of several Lizalfos circling the shrine.

“There’s a lot of those lizard things in the area, isn’t there?” you asked.

“We’re nearing Zora territory,” he explained, and you nodded absentmindedly.

“So, they’re like aquatic or something?”

Link shrugged. “They can swim.”

The steady warmth of the fire settled you further. It beat against your skin, slightly too intense not to edge on burning where you stayed in one place for too long.

“What’s the Zora kingdom like?” you asked, equally out of boredom and genuine curiosity.

Link took his time to answer. “Hospitable,” he said eventually, and then hurriedly added, “for the most part.”

“For the most part? Did you have some weird run-ins?”

Link’s face turned a little sour, and the transparency of his expression hit you with more force than you expected. “One of the Zora elders did not take kindly to me being a Hylian.”

“What? Why?” you asked, genuinely incredulous at the mere idea that someone could harbour a grudge towards the Hylians.

“I think he believed we were to blame for the blight one-hundred years ago.”

At that, you went completely silent.

Even Link noticed the immediacy of your stiffness. He called out to you, gently, and when you didn’t respond, sat up to get a better look at your face. Eyes locked in a firm thousand-yard stare, you looked straight ahead, refusing to look at him, the fire, or even anything in particular.

“Link,” you started, in almost complete monotone. There was no doubt in his mind then, that whatever you were about to tell him was important. “You know I’m a human, right?”

Truthfully, it wasn’t a difficult thing to see. The unsharpened curve of your ears was all it took to confirm it. You were convinced he’d mentioned it the night before, anyway, so you weren’t surprised to see him nod.

“Good, good,” you mumbled, and tried to shift into a more comfortable position (which extended more or less entirely into pushing yourself further against his arm). “I’ve been with the Sheikah in Kakariko for pretty much my entire life,” you said, “so to tell the truth, I’m not sure how much the outside world knows about my race.”

You didn’t notice when the two of you first settled so closely against each other, but even as a sudden realisation it felt more like a dull afterthought than anything that would convince you to move away from him.

“I’m not even sure how many of us there are left,” you said, and your tone was dark and low.

Link shifted, but it wasn’t to move away from you. Quite the opposite, he propped himself up with one of his hands and let you rest on his collar.

You felt his breathing, slow and steady against your cheek.

If your closeness looked romantic, it certainly didn’t feel like it. It didn’t even feel friendly, not really. It was more a case of comfort, of settling into an atmosphere that the both of you got tangled in and letting it tangle your bodies together.

“Why?” he asked.

For a while, the only sound was that of the rain and fire. The moment felt entirely too fragile, like a soft cocoon of spider webs that further pushed you into him, made your body heavy and his firm, bare skin warm and inviting. You didn’t want to mention it out loud, lest one of you returned to your senses and pulled away to sit on the other side of the tent again.

But you couldn’t answer his question, either.

“Link,” you started, and a moment of hesitation stalled you. “You’ve been travelling for a while, right?"

He nodded, because he had.

"Have you seen any other humans?”

The question caught him off guard. Truthfully, he’d never considered it before. Those he met were only ever split into categories of ‘need help’, ‘can offer advice’, or ‘are shopkeepers’. The shape of their ears never bore much significance to how they’d be intertwined into his journey. Before now, he’d never even actively thought about humans as a race.

With a degree of uncertainty, he shook his head.

You hmmed.

“Yeah, I expected that.” There was a heavy intimacy in the warm red cast onto your face, revealing the calm reverie of your expression through the darkness of the cloudy afternoon. Pale flames lapped gently at the firewood, and every gentle crackle sent you receding further into Link’s collar. “I haven’t seen any other humans for a while, either.”

He inspected the curves of your face: the flat, horizontal line of your mouth, the small flicker of flames reflected in your lidded eyes, and the sweep of orange firelight that became your circular ears.

“When was the last time?” he asked.

If you were surprised at his curiosity, you did not mention it. Instead, you let yourself settle further into the earth (and by extension, into him), slow flames flickering heat against your skin.

“I think I was seven.”

“That’s a long time,” he said, almost numbly. If the physical closeness was as relaxing to him as it was to you, then it was probably to blame for the slurred nature of his tongue, melting words together in much the same manner he felt you melt into him.

“Yeah.”

Link looked at you curled into his shoulder, your hair pressing against the skin of his collar. You were staring at the fire, watching its long arms jitter and flow, and he was staring at you, at the soft mist in your eyes and the soft curve of your cheeks and the soft, soft, soft --

“Humans used to be common,” you said.

Link snapped out of his reverie instantly—so quickly that you almost felt the spike in his heartrate. His voice got stuck in his throat; it lodged itself firmly at the base and refused to budge, and for a second that felt entirely too long to be just that, the only thing that came to mind was the clarity with which he felt your breath against him.

You took his silence as cue to speak further, and he let you, too scared to speak lest his voice betrayed—whatever he was feeling, really, (he wasn’t sure himself), and too scared to move lest your head fell on his chest and you felt the erratic pace of his heart.

“We didn’t have much compared to the other races,” you said placidly. Your tone was calm—too calm almost (at least compared to the drumroll in his chest). “Granted, we were meek compared to the physical power of the Gerudo, and we could never outlast a Goron. We weren’t particularly graceful in the water, and there was nothing we could do about our lack of wings, something that might have put us on equal footing with the Ruto.”

Link was still silent, and only the crackle of the fire dared interrupt you.

“Our rivalry with the Hylians, however, was by far the most hopeless.”

It was the first time since you started that your eyes met with his. He expected some hint of indoctrinated anger, some sort of deep-seated resentment towards him as a result of your past, so he prepared himself accordingly by sheepishly looking away. But there was no such thing. Soft, through and through, you looked at him like a mother might look at her child.

He didn’t like it.

“They were everything that we were, but seemingly better. Our best men would never stand a chance against bodies that were designed, as the Hylians self-proclaimed, to be in the image of Gods; that could heal in seconds with elixirs, boasted over thrice the life expectancy, long-standing power in Royalty, and that were, in every way, stronger and more durable.”

He inspected his own hands, slim, but tough, and compared them to the feel of your skin against his. Tender; soft. He understood then, that even based on appearances, human bodies were less compact and efficient.

“For a while, we were peaceful enough with the Hylians that our shortcomings made no significant difference. It wasn’t all smooth sailing, but there were no laws against humans getting married, having families with Hylians, and assimilating into Hyrule town as regular citizens. Not for a while, anyway.”

Still, he couldn’t help but feel like there was something endearing about the tenderness of a human being, even if it meant you couldn’t hit as hard. A prettiness that couldn’t be replaced with strength or power.

“But children from Hylian and human couples were more of the latter. Rounded ears and human-like instincts were by far more common, and the children would grow up to be weaker, with a complete resistance to any elixir or potion.”

He imagined what it would feel like to wrap his fingers around your arms and your stomach; how your skin would dimple around the tip of his fingers. It was not erotic in nature, but the appeal of the idea far exceeded what he imagined. It brought almost a cathartic sense of intimacy, of being able to feel something vulnerable and settle into it as it settled around where he pushed and pulled.

“The King’s son had always taken the words of ancient scriptures to heart. By the time the former King passed, and the son took his place, he’d developed extreme ideals of Hylian purity. He believed that the Hylians’ pointed ears let them receive messages from the Gods. In turn, their superhuman strength was a gift, given in return for playing the role of holy messengers.”

 _Soft_ , he could imagine, and the idea was so attractive that when he took to gripping his own forearm, the firmness with which it met his fingers spread a grimace across his face.

“To him, humans were evil creatures. He described them as spies and traitors who wanted to lead Hylians away from their religious lifestyles. He said they sapped the strength of Hylian children by infiltrating their homes, stealing their vitality, shortening their lifespans, and severing them from their power to listen to the Gods.”

He watched your soft lips curve around vowels and consonants. You felt entirely too fragile to exist, like the shard of a small petal in a short-lived flight from its blossom. Gentle. Easy to break. Tough things were strong, he thought, as his own stomach tightened with the stutter of his breathing; soft things were not.

“He triggered civil unrest in a place that was tip-toeing on eggshells, and before the end of the next decade, anti-human laws had made it into Hyrule. Humans couldn’t even put up a decent fight. No amount of ingenuity could make their weapons sharp enough to win in combat against those who could heal their bodies with food in only minutes, or their arguments good enough to overthrow the opinion of the Royal family.”

You were soft.

“Sorry, am I talking too much?” you asked, and he noticed with an urgent sense of alarm that he’d been caught staring.

Almost frantically, he shook his head.

“Are you sure? I’m not sending you to sleep, am I?”

“No,” he said. His voice wavered, caught on a precipice between firm and desperate. “I want to hear more,” but he didn’t know whether it was thanks to genuine curiosity, or whether he just liked seeing your lips move.

“Alright,” you said, pushed your head further into him. For a little while, you just watched the fire. “Hm,” your voice, deep and relaxed, soothed his adrenaline into something calmer, a little more subdued. “Where was I?”

“Anti-human laws in Hyrule,” he said.

“Ah, yes. Well--”

(Truly, Link thought, there had to be something inherently calming about you. It was the only way he could explain away the degree with which your voice has eased his pulse.)

“Some humans chose to stay and be stripped of their fertility through magic, while others escaped southward, to the province of Ordona.”

Vaguely, he recalled the village of Ordon in his mind, appearing in tapestries of Hyrule castle as the birthplace of the hero of Twilight. Often, he would look at the detail of the embroidered windmill, or the little sewn crowd of Ordon goats as he wandered the castle when it was still untainted by Ganon’s power. When he focused, really focused, he could (but barely) remember the figures of humans surrounding the hero, standing with their arms raised towards the sky, ears perfectly round.

“It stayed that while for a while. Humans were seen as not quite their own race, but as a disfigurement of the Hylians; outcasts who occupied small houses tucked away in the south, where not even maps made the effort to encompass them. It came as no surprise then, that when the Champions were created, there was no human chosen representative.”

Again, you looked straight at him, and there was a stable quality to your eyes that proved discordant to the softness he’d associated with your gentleness.

“What’s worse…” you began, and a sad, small smile that didn’t quite reach your eyes took his own hostage, and he found that he couldn’t quite look away. “We could have helped. We might not have been warriors, but we were good with technology, and the majority of inventions accredited to the Sheikah started out as things we had created.”

No anger, no bitterness for the privilege that was taken away from your race. Just an empathetic appreciation for the tragedy of how history had run its course.

“The most recent ruler, King Rhoam, was entirely devoted to constructing a force that would re-seal the encroaching threat of Calamity Ganon, who’s return had been prophesized for the better half of the last century. His responsibility to Hyrule came before any reservations he had about humans, so he made the full effort to welcome us back, repealing all of the anti-human laws in one fell swoop and praising our achievements with technology - regardless of the backlash from his people.”

If Link had ever been exposed to this darker side of the Royal family, his memories of it must have atrophied along with rest. All of it was fresh, new information to him, and he painted vivid pictures of your stories in his head, spurred on by the steady crackle of the whitening firewood.

“It was a good decision at the time,” you said, and there was a sense of exasperation that you hadn’t used yet. “But it screwed Hyrule over in the end. Ganon had already made use of our long-harboured hatred towards the Royal family. Stories of our misfortunes had been written about and passed down in generations, from our ancestors to books, from books to our fathers, and from our fathers to us. He was the first in centuries to show sympathy for the way we were wiped from history, for all the inventions we’d had stolen from us.”

Detachment, he thought. There was no correspondence in the monotone of your voice to the strength of your language, and he wondered how you could share none of your ancestor’s anger at the mistreatment of your race. A couple of centuries were hardly a long time for a Hylian, after all, so he couldn’t imagine dropping a grudge as powerful as one that had your entire race banished for little more significant than matters of pride.

“He swore that if we were to aid him in his take-over Hyrule, he would grant us power and a place on the Royal Throne.”

The majority of the firewood had now receded into a pale white, flecks of ash still making their way up into the sky, only to fall to the ground soon after.

“It wasn’t ideal, but we did what we thought was best. We agreed to King Rhoam under the pretence of repairing relations, but held him to a promise that he wouldn’t reveal our exploits until after we had assisted the Hylians in the study and further development of the Guardians and the Divine Beasts, to reduce backlash from his people.”

Link could feel his strength waning in the warmth of the fire, but hearing King Rhoam’s familiar name was enough to keep him focused.

“The King was desperate to do everything he could for his Kingdom. So he agreed.”

Your words turned into vague strings of sentences, ominous in wording, but still soft and monotone enough that his heart never jilted to his throat.

“So we sabotaged everything we could. We created exploits for Ganon to take control of the machines, even under the watchful eyes of appointed Sheikah. We used our skills in craft to make the Guardians seem undefeatable, only to follow Ganon’s instructions at every step and inconspicuously ruin their creations.”

He imagined humans working in disguises, planning circuits for the Guardians and dirtying them with Ganon’s magic. The whole picture was guttural, and he couldn’t help but wonder how differently everything may have turned out had he known about this earlier.

“On the day of reckoning, my great-great-grandparents waited patiently at their windows, watched the sky turn red with the colour of flames, and smiled.”

Your voice broke off into disbelief.

There, his memory overlapped with your story. He remembered painfully tugging Zelda across forests, fighting off Guardians to the best of his ability as embers surrounded him on all sides. The gentle flames of the campfire turned into an inferno, rushing through Hyrule castle town and engulfing whole houses, taking entire families in matters of seconds.

He had not stayed long enough to see what became of the town, but often in his travels, he would see the place where it used to be – bustling with Guardians and dark, congested clots of Ganon’s power, thick webs of black and purple hardening into noxious walls thrice his height.

“We all waited patiently for our reward, but almost a century without news of it came and went,” you continued, and he could not say he was surprised to hear that Ganon didn’t keep to his promise. “When our patience ran out, we started sending our people to Hyrule castle to reach Ganon and remind him of his promise.”

It was then that the question of your detachment with the issue was promptly answered, when your tone of voice changed to something more personal and intimate, rather than the monotone retelling of a story that had been passed down to you through generations.

“I wasn’t old enough to get on board with much of what was going on. I knew the stories, but at seven, I couldn’t hate our past with the same passion my parents did. I was just sad and angry when messenger after messenger perished on the way to Hyrule castle, killed by Guardians or Moblins.”

The idea of losing those close to you was familiar to him, but he couldn’t imagine what it felt like to have them be picked off, one by one. Was it better when it happened quickly, he mused, like pulling out a splinter? Or was it better as a slow creep that did not have the same sense of urgency?

“But eventually, someone came back.”

A subtle sense of relief rushed through him when he saw you focused on the fire. It felt as though he had free reign to stare, to analyse and mirror the calm neutrality of your own expression.

“I don’t think I’d ever seen Ordon so happy. The whole village was bustling with gossip, alive with the news that Ganon, our saviour, was sorry for making us wait. That he would give us our reward that same evening.”

The neutral line of your mouth curved into a distant grimace, and he knew, at that exact moment, that this story would not have a happy ending.

“The whole town was supposed to get together to celebrate. My grandfather brought his best goats, my neighbour dragged his coal oven out to the porch, and my mother picked the prettiest apples she could find in our orchard.”

Link did his best to pay attention, to really analyse the fluctuations in your voice and the jitters in your brows. But he found he was drifting, hazing out (not out of tiredness, certainly not), but out of some version of touch-drunk wooziness.

“As the child of the best hunter in the village, I got sent to hunt for rabbits a little way off.”

Your bow, an old, sturdy twig wrapped red and white rested against the tent where you left it.

Your next words came quietly.

“I was gone for barely two hours,” you said. “But when I came back, the whole place was burning. Guardians crawled over it like spiders, and I could feel the heat of flames on my face even from a hill, far away.”

Again, the gentle ebb of the campfire became visceral and hungry. He imagined it swallowing the town of Ordon as the spindly legs of Guardians jolted and climbed over the ruined remains.

“It was like something out of a story,” you said, and he nodded, because he knew.

You swallowed thickly, leaning your face down and out of Link’s sight, into his chest. When you continued, the gravelly nature of your voice caught him off guard.

“I ran away. Never looked back.”

He could almost feel the guilt rolling in your stomach, making it hard to push the words out. A sense of familiarity (akin to the one he’d felt when you first played with the Sheikah slate) burned bright – ebbing with the fire, backwards and forwards, between Zelda’s tears and your steeled expression.

“Maybe I should have went down there – and, I don’t know, tried helping survivors, but – “

“No.” Link’s own voice came out slurred and scratchy, exhaustion and pity ganging up on him and stripping him of his fortitude. “It’s good you ran,” he said, and maybe it was what you needed to hear. “I ran too.”

A laugh, just a little raw not to be the precursor to bursting into tears.

“Well, if the most courageous man in Hyrule ran, then maybe running was alright.”

He nodded, a drowsy, slow movement that heavied his head with thoughts of sleep. The next part of your story (buried in-between tears and choked sobs) fuzzed into background noise in his fight against sleep. He was barely awake to hear you describe the next three years of your life as an orphan living in the wild, until a branch snapped beneath your feet on an attempt to get to a sparrow’s nest, and Paya and Impa found you on the ground in tears, with two fractured legs and broken arms.

He didn’t hear you stumble over words as you tried to articulate the vast loneliness that you felt that night, when you were completely convinced you’d die alone, in complete silence.

There was no memory of the way you looked at his serene, sleeping face, and asked him to  _trust you_. Begged him to put his faith in you and stop throwing his life away at every opportunity.

No memory of anything. Just the steady warmth of the fire against his skin and the sound of rain hitting the tent he was hiding in.

When he woke up, the sky had tempered its downpour. You were getting dressed into a dry set of clothes, and he watched as your pants fit snugly around your waist, as your shirt fell over your chest and covered the blue bruise that had been inflicted on you by the Sheikah foot soldier yesterday afternoon (that he’d seen the night before, as you got changed in the darkness).

He hadn’t protected you back then, he thought, as a mosaic of images coloured his mind with the softness of your skin. With you as a child, standing over a hill and realising that you would never see your family again. With the tremor in your fingers at holding the bow when aiming at the Yiga, and the assuredness of your fluid, fast strokes when aiming at the Keese. With Mipha, who spoke strong words with a fragile voice and threw spears without hesitation (but died, anyway), and with princess Zelda, who was assured, but all the more insecure, who keeled on the muddy forest floor in the midst of rain and buried herself into him, sobbing for the lives of everyone who’d perished in face of the calamity.

He hadn’t protected them back then.

He would do better.

**Author's Note:**

> To get updates on my writing, please follow @ao3-actually-android on tumblr.


End file.
